The Drug War's Einsatzgruppen

General Colin Powell's Doctrine of the U.S. Armed Forces is that the United States should be the `meanest dog in town' to frighten a potential enemy.... When force is used, it should be with `overwhelming strength and no half-way measures.' In law enforcement, these principles are routinely applied in both field and tactical operations. ... Law enforcement [application] of the Powell Doctrine is clear: have overwhelming and superior resources available, primarily as a deterrent, but use them decisively when needed. --

Career Law Enforcement Officer Edward "Tad" Leach, "Applying the Powell Doctrine to Law Enforcement," Police Chief magazine, October 2001 (executive summary) 


Einsatzgruppen (German) -- "Special task forces" composed of police, military, and intelligence personnel deployed to target and eliminate people identified as "anti-German elements" by the National Socialist regime.



The invaders who murdered Hampton, Virginia resident William Cooper swiped about $900 in cash. They seized his gun collection. They took the Lexus from his driveway. By some oversight they neglected to extract the gold fillings from his teeth.

While they made off with a decent haul, the robbers were doubtless disappointed that they couldn't locate the large stash of illicit prescription drugs they had expected to find. They had the luxury of tossing the home at leisure without worrying about being interrupted by the police -- on account of the fact that they were the police. 


William Cooper, a 69-year-old retiree who suffered from the familiar variety of afflictions attendant to age, was startled awake on the morning of June 18 by two men who had barged into his home with their guns drawn and ready. Since he lived in a neighborhood in which home invasions (of the non-State-sanctioned variety) were commonplace, Cooper slept with a loaded handgun on his nightstand. He made an entirely proper but regrettably ineffective use of that weapon in an effort to repel the intruders, and was gunned down in his bedroom. 

The police raid was triggered by an unsubstantiated tip from a still-anonymous informant that the NASA retiree -- who walked with a cane and, according to his neighbors, never seemed to have any visitors -- was illegally selling prescription drugs from his home. After they murdered Cooper, the police found about two-dozen different prescription drugs in the home, including various painkillers and medications for blood pressure, heart disease, and diabetes. 

Newport News Daily Press photo

 An apparatchik with the Hampton PD insisted that the lethal home invasion had turned up "evidence" of illegal drug dealing. Someone not required to lie for reasons of professional convenience would admit the obvious: The victim of this needless home invasion was simply a sick, helpless old man who made extensive use of his Medicare Part D benefits. Now that he's dead, the people responsible for killing him are permitted to keep the stolen property as "proceeds" from alleged narcotics dealing. 

The lethal June 18 assault on William Cooper's home was carried out under the supposed authority of Virginia's Peninsula Narcotics Enforcement Task Force (PNETF). 

The "Asset Forfeiture Addendum" to the PNETF's most recent "Memorandum of Understanding" specifies that "TASK FORCE investigations should result in the seizure of forfeitable assets." It is also expected that the plunder will be distributed "in a fair and equitable manner," with a little more than one-third going to the city governments of Hampton and Newport News, a little less than a fifth going to the State Police, and the rest being lavished on the "Peninsula  Association of Commonwealth Attorney's Association" (redundancy in the original). At least some of the boodle would be used to cultivate other informants, as well.


To understand what really happened in William Cooper's home on June 18, it's useful to imagine the murdered retiree's body surrounded by police, prosecutors, and local politicians who pick over his lifeless form like a colony of vultures. The cash is divvied up, with Hampton and Newport News getting about $300 apiece, the State Police receiving roughly $180, and the local prosecutors laying claim to about $120. For taking the lead in the heist, the Hampton Police Department is permitted to keep Cooper's car and gun collection, to use or liquidate as it sees fit.

As this is a "civil forfeiture" action, it's not necessary to prove that Cooper actually broke any law. And since he's dead, he can't contest the forfeiture action in court. If police had conducted an actual investigation, rather than staging a home invasion robbery on the pretext provided by an unsubstantiated tip from an unknown informant, they and their cohorts wouldn't have been rewarded with this modest haul.

The Gilbert SWAT team, as depicted on its website.

Gilbert, Arizona resident Ross Taylor was fortunate enough not to share William Cooper's fate when the local counter-narcotics task force staged an assault on Taylor's home. 

This has to be considered a species of miracle, given that the raiding party consisted of at least a dozen masked commandos who were clad in riot gear, packing assault rifles, and obviously eager for an opportunity to put a boot on someone's neck. 

The throng of armed tax-feeders that laid siege to Taylor's home consisted of five undercover officers and seven from the criminal apprehension team. As the Phoenix New Times reports, the police raid came in response to a tip from the guy who installed Taylor's satellite TV system, a collectivist drone with the soul of a Stasi informant who who spied a tiny amount of pot in the house and did his duty. As an overture to the assault, the raiders cut power and water to the targeted home, presumably to prevent anyone inside from disposing of the purported contraband. 

Taylor had just purchased his home at the time of the raid. Three employees of a local moving company were present when the stormtroopers arrived; they were handcuffed and detained for more than an hour while the raiders interrogated Taylor and ransacked his house.  

As it happens, there was marijuana in Taylor's home, but it wasn't contraband. Taylor is a card-carrying medical marijuana patient who is permitted, by what the Arizona government presumes to call the "law," to own up to 2.5 ounces of marijuana. 

Taylor patiently explained these facts to the bellicose bullies who were holding him at gunpoint. When he showed one of the SWAT operators his state-issued medical marijuana card, the masked invader told him, "I don't even know if you're supposed to have this card," referring to a lawsuit filed by Jan Brewer's administration against Proposition 203 (the Arizona Medical Marijuana Act), an initiative that passed last November.


Under the terms of that statute, as elucidated by the Arizona Department of Health Services (DHS), those who qualify for medical marijuana cards "can obtain medical marijuana from a dispensary, the qualifying patient's designated caregiver, another qualifying patient, or, if authorized to cultivate, from home cultivation." (Emphasis added.) 


Taylor told his unwanted visitors that he had purchased the marijuana from another card-carrying medical marijuana patient. He was informed that this meant he wasn't legally in possession of the marijuana, notwithstanding the fact that the text of the statute and the DHS guidelines explicitly permit transactions of that kind. 


According to Gilbert PD press flack Sgt. Bill Balafas, "no one is licensed to sell [marijuana] and no dispensaries are open, yet." Actually, the statute itself, as the DHS admits, effectively licenses anyone with a medical marijuana card to distribute pot to other qualified users.

The agency itself was required to begin issuing permits for marijuana dispensaries at the beginning of June. However, Gov. Brewer instructed Arizona Attorney General Thomas Horne to order the DHS to disobey the law by  refusing to accept applications for businesses seeking to open dispensaries. This was done to buy time while Brewer filed a federal lawsuit to overturn the voter-enacted medical marijuana law. 



Misguided conservatives who depict Jan Brewer as a champion of "states' rights" aren't likely to take note of, or be troubled by, her overture to Washington to practice nullification in reverse by intervening to suppress a voter-enacted measure liberalizing the state's marijuana laws. 

The Brewer administration's stated reason for seeking an injunction against the law is a fear that state employees would be subject to prosecution for violating federal anti-drug ordinances. That legal argument was supplied by "Keep AZ Drug Free," the pressure group that opposed last year's marijuana initiative. (It's worth pointing out that the organization's name encompasses the patent falsehood that Arizona, or any other state, is and can be kept "drug-free.") A more honest assessment would lead to the conclusion that in Arizona, as is the case everywhere in the Soyuz, state and local law enforcement agencies have been subsumed into the federal Drug War apparatus -- and that the political elite aren't willing to end that lucrative arrangement. 


The Arizona Criminal Justice Commission,  which is "responsible for granting millions of federal and state dollars" to police agencies, has designated support for narcotics task forces, along with related asset forfeitures, as its "first priority." The Commission's current "State Strategy" for "Drug, Gang and Violent Crime Control" is commendably barren of idiotic prattle about making, let alone "keeping," the state drug-free. It acknowledges that Arizona "is the arrival zone for most drugs smuggled into the United States"; that marijuana "remains readily available and is considered the most widely used illegal drug throughout the state"; that "cocaine is readily available throughout Arizona, and that the same is true of methamphetamine. 


The policy objective of the Arizona Criminal Justice Commission -- as is true in each of the other fifty federal administrative units called "state governments" -- is not to eliminate the narcotics trade, or even to abate it in any dramatic way, but rather to transmute it into a reliable source of revenue for the political class and its armed auxiliaries. Toward that end, the Commission in Arizona, with the help of plundered money provided by Washington, created sixteen state "drug task forces" in 2007. Those task forces have "a permanent institutional tie" with the Attorney General's Office of Financial Remedies.

Arizona's coercive sector has benefited tremendously from "the overwhelming success of the asset forfeiture [program] in Arizona," boasts the Commission. In the year following creation of the sixteen state counter-narcotics task forces, revenue from asset forfeitures more than doubled -- from $19,576,626 in 2006 to $40,297,456 in 2007.

As Tom Barry of the Center for International Policy observes, the Commission's strategy document leaves the impression it "is a drug war agency, not one dedicated to finding ways to improve criminal justice in Arizona." Once again, this is typical of law enforcement nation-wide: "Whether at the state or county government level, the war on drugs is the main prism through which criminal justice and law enforcement agencies view crime and violence."

What this means, of course, is that "local" police agencies are essentially support systems for a plundering army that is literally waging war against the people in the guise of narcotics enforcement. In fact, a good case can be made that these paramilitary task forces -- or, to use the proper German translation, einsatzgruppen -- are carrying out the precise role that would be played by the dreaded blue-helmeted UN "peace enforcement" units that haunt the imagination of many "law and order" conservatives. 

Which is the more urgent threat -- UN "peacekeepers" Congo...

The idea of a UN "Peace Force" was made official federal government policy in the 1961 State Department Document entitled "Freedom from War: The United States Program for General and Complete Disarmament in a Peaceful World." 

That proposal, also known as State Department Document 7277, outlined a three-stage program through which the United Nations would be "progressively strengthened in order to improve its capacity to assure international security and the peaceful settlement of disputes." All national governments would be required to provide military personnel and assets to empower the UN, which -- as British author Simon Tisdall reminds us, was always intended to be a "war-fighting machine," rather than a forum for peaceful resolution of disputes.

The Orwellian locution employed to describe this function is "peace enforcement." The ongoing mission in Libya, which Mr. Obama refuses to describe as "hostilities" (meaning, one supposes, that they must be considered "kinetic military congenialities"), offers a perfect example of how the 7277 program works in practice: The president, invoking the supposed obligation to uphold the "credibility and effectiveness of the United Nations Security Council," committed personnel and resources to an aggressive war without congressional involvement of any kind. Once again, that is how the international component of the "Freedom From War" program functions.

In the domestic realm, "Freedom From War" dictates that each national government maintain a centralized, militarized "internal security force." In the intervening decades, many American critics of the UN have speculated that this element of the 7277 program mandated the eventual occupation of the country by Blue Helmet-wearing foreign troops. What has actually happened is that American police forces have been transformed into a domestic army of occupation in the service of a UN-administered program of "global drug prohibition." 

The framework for global prohibition, interestingly, was also unveiled in 1961 -- the UN's Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs. As a recent report from the Global Commission on Drug Policy (a body that includes several former high-ranking UN functionaries, including former Secretary General Kofi Annan) points out that the UN and the U.S. government, working through the International Narcotics Control Board,“have worked … to ensure that all countries adopt the same rigid approach to drug policy – the same laws, and the same tough approach to law enforcement.”

This was described as a campaign to create a "drug-free" world -- just as the "Freedom From War" proposal was allegedly intended to abolish international military conflict. In practice, of course, both of those initiatives were actually intended to consolidate the power of a permanent international Power Elite, as well as to expand its ability to regiment and plunder productive society. 

... or militarized police at home? (Note the tally of "kills on the APC.)

It was in the mid-1980s that the federal government began the practice of confiscating money and property as narcotics "proceeds" through civil asset forfeiture. Washington effectively globalized that practice through Article V of the 1988 Vienna Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances, which dictates that signatory nations "adopt such measures as may be necessary to enable confiscation" of money and property designated as "proceeds" of the narcotics trade.

The U.S. government has eagerly tutored other countries in the use of "non-conviction-based" confiscation -- that is, seizure of property from people never found guilty of a crime.

All of this did exactly nothing to mitigate the problem of drug addiction, let alone put an end to it. It did, however, dramatically amplify the profits enjoyed by both the private sector criminals who distribute narcotics and the immeasurably more vicious political criminals who are their obvious -- albeit usually unacknowledged -- business partners. 

Fifty years after the UN -- which has always been an instrument of the Anglo-American Power Elite -- called for a "drug-free world," the narcotics trade is the world's largest cash business. According to Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN's Office of Drugs and Crime, during the 2008 global financial meltdown, laundered proceeds from drug trafficking kept the international banking system liquid until the official counterfeiters at the Federal Reserve could take over. 

Historian Charles Burris refers to the beast created by "the massive covert intersection of governments, financial institutions, and organized crime in the international narcotics trade" as the "Narcosaurus." Its bloody footprints can be seen everywhere from the opium fields of Afghanistan  (which are guarded by U.S. military personnel) to the doorways of people like William Cooper and Jose Guerena -- innocent Americans murdered by the Drug War einsatzgruppen in their own homes.

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When the State Breaks a Man

"How much does the State weigh?" Josef Stalin asked an underling who had been ordered to extract a confession from an enemy of his regime. Stalin understood that, given enough time, agents of State-sanctioned cruelty can break any man.


Thomas J. Ball, who committed suicide by self-immolation on the steps of New Hampshire's Cheshire County Courthouse on June 15, was a man who had been broken by the State. A lengthy suicide note/manifesto he sent to the Keene Sentinel, which was published the day after his death , described how his family had been destroyed, and his life ruined, through the intervention of a pitiless and infinitely cruel bureaucracy worthy of Stalin's Soviet Union: The Granite State's affiliate of the federal "domestic violence" Cheka. 

Ball and his family were casualties in what he calls a federal "war on men." He wasn't exaggerating -- and he has a lot of company.

The federally subsidized domestic violence industry operates a bit like the hypothetical Von Nuemann Machine: Placed into a material-rich environment, it will sustain and replicate itself by destroying and assimilating everything within its field of influence. One useful sci-fi example is the robotic Planet Killer from the Star Trek episode "The Doomsday Machine" -- an immense, funnel-shaped engine of destruction propelled by the remnants of the worlds it destroys (according to one deutero-canonical source, the Planet Killer uses the same material to generate replicas of itself). 

That monstrous device was "self-sustaining as long as there are bodies ... for it to feed on." The same is true, of course, of the State and all of its components -- including what Dr. Baskerville calls "The Divorce Regime."

As Baskerville points out in his horrifying study Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fatherhood, "it is no exaggeration to say that the existence of family courts, and virtually every issue they adjudicate -- divorce, custody, child abuse, child-support enforcement, even adoption and juvenile crime -- depend on one overriding principle: remove the father." When a family is broken up, each child "becomes a walking bundle of cash" -- not for the custodial parent, but for a huge and expanding population of tax-fattened functionaries who "adopt as their mission in life the practice of interfering with other people's children." 


Thomas Ball, like millions of others, learned that the people who choose this profession have an unfailing ability to exploit even the tiniest opportunity to invade a home and destroy a family.

One evening in April 2001, Mr. Ball suffered a momentary lapse of patience with a disobedient four-year-old daughter and slapped her face. He left the house at his wife's suggestion. When he called her a short time later, he learned that his wife -- "the type that believes that people in authority actually know what they are talking about" -- had called the police, who told her that her "abusive" husband wasn't permitted to sleep in his own home that night. Ball was arrested at work the following day. Under the conditions of his bail, he wasn't allowed to ask his wife what had possessed her to call the police. 

Years later Ball would learn that if his wife hadn't called the police and accused her husband of abuse, she would have been arrested as an accessory -- leaving the children at the mercy of New Hampshire's utterly despicable Division of Children, Youth, and Families (DCYF). 

Dot Knightly, who tried vainly for years to win custody of three grandchildren seized on the basis of spurious abuse and neglect accusations, recounts how a DCYF commissar contemptuously batted away both her pleas and her abundant qualifications to serve as a custodial caretaker: "Nobody gets their kids back in New Hampshire. The government gives us the power to decide how these cases turn out. Everyone who fights us loses." 

Despairing over being wrested away from everyone he loved, Dot's grade-school age grandson Austin -- who had literally been dragged screaming from his grandparents' home -- tried to commit suicide. This led to confinement in a psychiatric hospital and involuntary "treatment" with mind-destroying psychotropic drugs. For New Hampshire's child-snatchers, the phrase "nobody gets their kids back" translates into a willingness to destroy the captive children by degrees, rather than allow any successful challenge to their supposed authority.

The instant the police intervened in the domestic affairs of Thomas Ball's household, his family's destruction became inevitable. The officers were required -- not by law, but by official policy that followed profit incentives created by Washington -- to make an arrest. In a similar fashion, and for the same reason, prosecutors are forbidden to drop domestic abuse cases under any circumstances. 

Ball recalled that he was eventually found not guilty, much to the visible disgust of the be-robed dispenser of official injustice who presided at the trial. But this made no material difference: His wife -- who divorced him six months after his arrest -- was now a consort of the State, his children were its property. His innocence notwithstanding, Ball was given an open-ended sentence of serfdom -- and the prospect of being sent to debtor's prison -- through government-mandated "child support" system. Furthermore, he wasn't permitted to see his children, despite the fact that a jury had found him innocent.

"I lost visitation with my two daughters when I got arrested. One was the victim-the other was the witness. After a not guilty, I expected to get visitation with my girls. But the divorce judge ... decreed that counseling was in order and they would decide when we would reunite." 

The policy options that are rewarded by federal subsidies don't include allowing an innocent man to reunite with his children. Consigning him to the State-aligned "domestic counseling" industry -- which was apparently co-designed by August Mobius and Franz Kafka -- is a much more profitable alternative.


"Judges routinely use our children as bargaining chips," Ball explained. "Get the adult into counseling, continue the case for a year, and then drop it. This will open up the docket for the new arrests coming in next week. These judges that use our children are not honorable. Which is why I never use the term 'Your Honor' any more. I just call them judge."

Ball's experiences, once again, are all but identical to those endured by millions of others. Dr. Baskerville offers a potent and infuriating summary:


"A parent [generally a father] whose children are taken away by a family court is only at the beginning of his troubles. The next step comes as he is summoned to court and ordered to pay as much as two-thirds of even more of his income as `child support' to whomever has been given custody. His wages will immediately be garnished and his name will be entered on a federal register of `delinquents.' This is even before he has had a chance to become one, thought it is likely that the order will be backdated, so he will already be a delinquent as he steps out of the courtroom. If the ordered amount is high enough, and the backdating is far enough, he will be an instant felon and subject to immediate arrest."


The sinews of this system are the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement (OSCE) and its state-level affiliates. Some idea of the scope of the Regime's war on fathers is found in this comparison: In 2007, the Drug Enforcement Agency, the spearhead of the "war on drugs," employed a total of 4,600 armed field agents; the OSCE at the time boasted more than 60,000 enforcement agents, all of whom are permitted to carry firearms under the "Deadbeat Parents Enforcement Act." 


When brought to bear against an isolated individual, the weight of this State apparatus will eventually destroy the victim. With each year, Ball's financial condition deteriorated and he became deeply mired in intractable despair. By the time he ended his life on June 16, Ball was a 58-year-old Vietnam Era Army Veteran who had been unemployed for two years. Owing to the fact that he couldn't pay the amount of child support extorted from him, Ball was quite likely going to be sent to jail on the following morning.

His only consolation, the company of his children, was sadistically withheld from him. The unfathomably arrogant and completely unaccountable functionaries who did so are people who have learned how to monetize the misery of the innocent.


Ball's manifesto is a work of tortured eloquence. Rather than being the chaotic outpouring of a deranged personality, the letter is cogently organized, laden with impressive amounts of detailed research, and admirably epigrammatic. The lucidity Ball displayed in explaining his decision to kill himself by the most painful method imaginable underscores not merely the depth of his despair but also of the entrenched corruption and viciousness of the people who had demolished his family. 


The leitmotif in Ball's letter is the phrase "Second Set of Books," a phrase that refers to the "policies, procedures and protocols" actually followed by bureaucrats and their enforcers in defiance of the "First Set of Books" -- that is, the federal and state constitutions. 

"You never cover the Second Set of Books your junior year in high school," Ball pointed out. That because we are not suppose to have a Second Set of Books." The Second Set of Books contain writings that are too holy to be inspected by mere Mundanes. Those of us who don't belong to the Sanctified Brotherhood of Official Coercion are required to behave as if there is some continuing relevance to the First Set of Books. Maintaining this official fiction is necessary in order to convince the credulous -- well, those who pay attention to such matters -- that it is possible to receive redress of grievances through the same system that has aggrieved them.

Like millions of other victims of the State's "domestic violence" apparatus, Ball came to understand that the system cannot be reformed from within:


"On one hand we have the law. On the other hand we have what we are really going to do-the policies, procedures and protocols. The rule of law is dead. Now we have 50 states with legal systems as good as any third world banana republic. Men are demonized and the women and children end up as suffering as well. So boys, we need to start burning down police stations and courthouses. The Second Set of Books originated in Washington. But the dirty deeds are being carried out by our local police, prosecutors and judges." 

Tunisian martyr Mohamad Bouazizi shortly before his death.

 Rather than voting them out, Ball insists that it is necessary to "Burn Them Out" through arson attacks on the appropriate bureaucratic facilities. 

He hoped that his self-immolation would be the symbolic spark that would ignite that revolution --  just as a similar desperate act by Tunisian street vendor Mohamad Bouazizi sparked a nation-wide rebellion against the fetid dictatorship ruling that country.

While I hope that God has granted rest to Ball's tortured soul, and pray for the comfort of his family, it must be said that his proposed strategy is as tragically mistaken as his suicide. 

Rather than attacking the architectural manifestations of the State, we should withdraw from contact with it. In other words, don't call the police under any circumstances, and insulate your family, to the extent possible, from any contact with "welfare" bureaucracies of every kind. This will mean being prepared as parents to take appropriate evasive action when one of the State's tentacles reaches out, with malign intent, in the direction of one's children. It also means being prepared and able to employ purely defensive force where all other alternatives have failed. 


Human beings have an instinctive, primordial fear of fire. Burning to death is a prolonged agony in which pain receptors operate at full capacity. The torment Thomas Ball experienced was sufficient, in his mind, to eclipse the horrors of death by fire. 

On the same day that this tortured man poured gasoline on his body and struck a match, pundit Ann Coulter used her syndicated column to emit a thick stream of snotty abuse at Rep. Ron Paul and others who insist that the State must be removed entirely from any role in regulating or overseeing marriage and the family.


Hey, Ann-- do you get the point now? 

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Dum spiro, pugno!

"You Can No Longer Think of Yourselves as Peace Officers": Militarizing "Lockdown High"

 It was Friday the 13th, and Skylar Walters thought he was going to die. 

The 16-year-old inmate of Orangeville Jr.-Sr. High in Illinois was in gym class when a deranged-looking man barged into the school and began firing what appeared to be a handgun at several of the other students.

"I started praying to God and saying my last words," Skylar later recalled. "I was scared. I didn't know what to do."

As the intruder fired his gun, he called out the name of a particular student; the youngster quite sensibly fled the building. Other kids "were just running everywhere and crying and hiding," Skylar recounted. Some of the panicking schoolkids probably attempted to call or text their parents to describe the horror unfolding in front of them. They didn't know that each of the parents had been instructed not to answer if his child issued a desperate plea for help. 

That last sadistic touch is what distinguished the May 13 "active shooter drill" in Orangeville from countless other performances of its kind staged in schools across the Soyuz by the Police State Play Actors' Guild. Most of the time, the kids for whose supposed benefit those drills are choreographed -- and the parents responsible for their care, education, and upbringing -- are let in on the joke.

Last October 10, for example, a mob of "between 80 and 100 officials" from law enforcement agencies staged a little Garrison State melodrama in New York's William H. Barton Intermediate School. As described in the Glens Falls Post-Star: 

"Fire alarms sounded at 9:31 a.m., drawing closed doors. Three Warren County sheriff's officers and two state troopers conducted the first search, where they encountered students in a hallway and instructed them to sit down. They reached a second floor on a north wing of the school and found several bodies laying across the hallway. Police searched the classrooms, bathrooms and even an elevator, pressing their backs against walls before entering rooms and calling out `clear.' A cafeteria was secured as a transfer point for victims with casualties, and a triage site for patient evaluation was at a nearby school."

In that exercise, students -- some of them in grade school -- were recruited to play "victims." One of them was the third-grade daughter of Heather Holl, who was herself cast as a "victim" in the third trimester of pregnancy. Another bit player, Heather's son Alexander, "played the role of a gunshot victim" with an entry wound in his chest and a large exit wound in the back. 

It should be pointed out that the tactics employed in the "active shooter" scenario at the William H. Barton School focused on officer safety, rather than active intervention on behalf of the victims. In real life, Alexander Holl would have been one of several unarmed, helpless schoolchildren killed while the SWAT team -- encased in body armor and brandishing high-performance weaponry -- took exquisite care to minimize its exposure to risk.

 "He's excited," Heather commented as her son  was transported away from the scene by medical personnel. "He didn't even sleep last night."

At least he was given a copy of the script before the staged shooting began. The students who were deprived of that indispensable intelligence in Orangeville most likely aren't sleeping well now -- not because they're full of eager anticipation, but rather because they suffer from post-traumatic stress. 

Parents were required to participate passively in the scenario played out in Orangeville: They weren't informed about the event until curtain time, and then ordered to participate in an information embargo targeting their terrified kids. 

What this means, of course, is that although the disguised deputy playing the role of assailant was firing blanks, the schoolkids were, quite literally, being held hostage.

If a bank robber bluffs his way through a heist with a toy gun, he's committed a real crime. The same is true of the people who terrorized the inmates of Orangeville Jr.-Sr. High on May 13. School District Superintendent Randy Otto has submitted his resignation, and some parents have discussed the possibility of a lawsuit -- but the appropriate criminal charges against those responsible aren't forthcoming.

"Our number one goal is to save lives," warbled Leigh Anne Ryals, Emergency Management Director for Baldwin County, Alabama, following a similar school shooter drill in Robertsdale's Central Baldwin Middle School a few years ago. The means such drills employ are incompatible with that goal, since the standard template is based on the "Lockdown" Scenario: The killers conduct the rampage on their own terms, end it at a time of their choosing, and the SWAT team merely cattle-pens the victims. 

WKRG.com News

Like every other "security" measure inflicted on Americans since 9/11, the "lockdown" scenario treats schoolchildren as a tactical impediment -- or perhaps even a threat -- to be dealt with, rather than as innocent people to be protected. That model was actually put in place before 9/11 -- even before Columbine - as part of the federal "Safe Schools" dogma that grew out of the Regime's narcotics price support program (sometimes dishonestly called the "War on Drugs"). 

Today it is typical for police agencies to deploy "Resource Officers" to prowl the halls of schools in search of misbehavior that can be treated as criminal offenses, rather than disciplinary problems. 

 In his keynote address to the 2007 National Association of School Resources Conference, held against the rugged and forbidding backdrop of Orlando's Disney World, self-styled tactical and counter-terrorism John Giduck offered a telling glimpse into the mindset of the armed strangers who haunt local government schools:


"You've got to be a one-man fighting force.... You've got to have enough guns, and ammunition and body armor to stay alive.... You should be walking around in schools every day in complete tactical equipment, with semi-automatic weapons.... You can no longer afford to think of yourselves as peace officers.... You must think of yourself [sic] as soldiers in a war because we're going to ask you to act like soldiers." (Emphasis added.)

In her immensely informative and tirelessly infuriating new book Lockdown High: When The Schoolhouse becomes a Jailhouse, investigative reporter Annette Fuentes  describes Giduck's audience as " a sea of khaki uniforms, some [of whom in the crowd] were waring holstered handguns.... [M]ore than a few had shaved heads and bulging bellies or biceps. Some had both. If drug tests had been required for registration, odds are that a few steroid-positives could have resulted among the more muscular attendees."


Giduck himself has appointed himself an authority on the tactics and training of special forces despite a resume untainted by actual experience in the same. In similar fashion Giduck advertises himself as a world-caliber authority on radical Islam and counter-terrorism: He claims to have been tutored in counter-terrorism by "Putin's boss," the former head of the KGB, and to have trained with Soviet-era special forces, during a visit to Russia in the late Gorbachev era. Assuming that Giduck is telling the truth, that line on his vita should summarily disqualify him from having anything to do with children anywhere.


Whatever proves to be the truth about Giduck's claims, he is a prominent figure among the cohort Fuentes calls the "Profiteers of Lockdown High" -- an interlocking collection of governmental and quasi-private bureaucracies committed to eradicating the few substantive distinctions separating schools from prisons.

"Every day in communities across the United States, children and adolescents spend the majority of their waking hours in schools that increasingly have come to resemble places of detention more than places of learning," observes Fuentes.  Federally subsidized "zero tolerance" policies have created what Fuentes and other critics of the system call the "school-to-prison pipeline": "If yesterday's prank got a slap on the wrist, today those wrists could be slapped with handcuffs."

The danger here is not merely that schools have been largely transformed into short-term prison facilities; it's that the SROs deployed therein take seriously Giduck's catechism about being combat-ready "warriors," rather than peace officers. Their operational credo is not "protect and serve," but rather "control and dominate" -- and, with increasing frequency, "close and kill."

Those options are compellingly displayed in two entirely unnecessary police assaults on young teenagers: The case  of 17-year-old Derby, Kansas resident Jonathan Villareal, who was beaten, tasered, and handcuffed by police "resource officers" who took offense over the way the high school student was wearing his pants; and the murder of 14-year-old San Antonio reform school student Derek Lopez. Significantly, both of those incidents occurred after school hours.

Relieved by the end of his daily sentence in the government mind-laundry, Jonthan passed a brace of officially licensed bullies on the way to the bus. One of them told Jonathan to pull up his pants; the youngster replied -- hopefully with the appropriate measure of controlled contempt -- that school was over and he was thus free to dress any way he chose.

One of the thugs -- his tax-fattened bulk making him much larger than the scrawny adolescent --  threw Jonathan to the ground while bellowing the familiar rapist's refrain: "Stop resisting!" The other thug immediately joined in, both of them striking and kneeing the prone, helpless teenager in the back, legs, and neck. Jonathan also suffered a black eye.

When Jonathan struggled to his feet, he was thrown down forcefully; he felt his arm snap as he hit the ground. He struggled to his feet again, thereby giving one of the costumed enforcers an excuse to report that the victim had assumed an "aggressive stance." This supposedly justified a potentially lethal taser attack.

The Derby High School newspaper, appropriately called the Informer, explained that students can be subjected to "administrative" discipline for wearing their pants "inappropriately." Derby Police Chief Robert Lee described the incident as "a flagrant violation of school policy that could have been handled administratively, if he had not resisted the SRO."

Once again, we see the logic of the rapist at work: If the victim is severely injured or killed for fighting back, it's her own fault; she shouldn't have resisted. This comparison, of course, is unfair: Rapists and other aggressors not swaddled in government-issued costumes aren't generally permitted to file criminal charges against victims who fight back. The Derby Police Department "will take the incident to the district attorney for possible criminal charges against Villareal," observes the Informer. 

Through an interpreter, Villareal's mother said that she "understands if they need to arrest him for being disrespectful," but that she doesn't understand why "they need to beat him up for whatever reason."

The short answer, of course, is this: They do it because they can.

Derby High's dress code is described as part of an effort to beat back the insidious "gang culture" considered to be a besetting scourge of society. Doubtless the school also participates in the Regime's "anti-bullying campaign," in which students are encouraged to rat out each other whenever they hear inappropriate comments, or see what they believe to be inappropriate conduct.

None of this applies to the sanctified bullies in military attire, of course. Since they belong to the State's punitive priesthood, those skeevy armed adults can loiter around schools, leering like Aqualung at underage girls and taunting smaller young males in an attempt to provoke them into doing something to justify a righteous beating -- followed by prosecution for "resisting arrest."

With troubling frequency, this State-authorized bullying involves the use of consistently lethal weapons, such as the ubiquitous portable electro-shock torture device. On occasion, it involves unambiguous criminal homicide. Witness the November 12, 2010 killing of Derek Lopez by Officer Daniel Alvarado of San Antonio's Northside Independent School District Police.

Alvarado was an exceptionally unqualified officer even by the dismal standards that prevail among the ranks of tax-subsidized gun thugs. Between March 2006 and November 2010, Alvarado was suspended four times. Four times he was informed by supervisors that he faced "immediate termination."

For some reason -- most likely one rooted in police union politics -- when it came time to fire Alvarado, his superiors just couldn't bring themselves to pull the trigger. Alvarado displayed no similar scruples on November 12, 2010, when he murdered 14-year-old Derek Lopez, who had just taken part in a brief scuffle with another student.

Owing to his own troubled past, Lopez was a student at the Bexar County Juvenile Justice Academy. At around 4:30 PM on the fatal day, Lopez sucker-punched a 13-year-old classmate at a bus stop.

"He just hit me once," the student later recalled in a sworn deposition. "It wasn't a fight. It was nothing."

Unfortunately, Alvarado happened to be prowling the intersection in his patrol car, and witnessed the trivial dust-up.

"Freeze!" Alvarado shouted at Lopez, who bolted from the scene. Alvarado, in his mid-40s, briefly gave token pursuit before wheezing out the first of several self-serving falsehoods.

"I just had one run from me," gasped the winded tax-feeder. "I saw an assault in progress. He punched the guy several times." (Emphasis added.)

A supervisor instructed Alvarado "not [to] do any big search over there" in pursuit of the assailant. "Let's stay with the victim and see if we can identify [the suspect] that way."

Rather than doing as he was ordered, Alvarado bundled the "victim" -- who was probably more terrified of the armed functionary than of his obnoxious classmate -- into the patrol car and went in pursuit of Lopez.

Lopez vaulted a nearby fence and hid in a backyard shed containing Christmas decorations. The homeowner saw the intrusion, and a neighbor flagged down Alvarado's patrol car. The officer drew his gun "when he came up the driveway," recalled the homeowner.

Within a minute or so, a single gunshot resonated through the neighborhood. When asked by the horrified homeowner what had happened, Alvarado -- who reportedly looked "dazed or distant" -- replied that Lopez "came at me."

"The suspect bull rushed his way out of the shed and lunged right at me," the timorous creature later claimed in an official report. "The suspect was literally inches away from me, and I feared for my own safety."(Emphasis added.)

Alvarado was lying, of course. An autopsy revealed "no evidence of close range firing [on] the wound," and no gunpowder stains were found on the victim's bloody t-shirt.

By this time, the boy who had taken the punch at the bus stop had called his mother via cell phone. She arrived shortly after Alvarado had gunned down Lopez.

"At one point, the mother told a witness, `He shot him? Why did he shoot him? He didn't have to shoot him," reports the San Antonio News-Express.

Alvarado, who four times was on the cusp of being fired for insubordination, disobeyed a direct order on November 12. He falsified key details of the shooting in his official report. A 14-year-old boy was gunned down execution-style for the venial offense of engaging in an adolescent scuffle, and for compelling an overweight middle-aged badge-polisher to run a few hundred yards. According to the San Antonio Police Department, this is all perfectly acceptable: The department ruled that the murder of Derek Lopez was a "justified" shooting.

Although he's been removed from patrol duty, Alvarado remains on the force, albeit in a tax-underwritten sinecure. Although he had repeatedly been threatened with termination for sloppiness or defiance in carrying out administrative duties, Alvarado faces neither criminal prosecution nor professional censure for murdering a 14-year-old boy.

Apparently, insubordination in carrying out office functions is a much graver matter than insubordination that results in the needless death of an adolescent Mundane.

Despite the fact that this incident involved two teenage boys who attended a special school for troubled juveniles, parents should understand that students in practically any government-run "educational" institution can fall prey to sudden -- and potentially lethal -- police violence.

The purpose of "active shooter drills" is not to refine protocols intended to protect inmates of government schools; instead, it is to habituate children to the presence of paramilitary operators in their midst. Parents should ponder that reality as millions of young Americans begin their welcome Summer parole from the government's hybrid school/prison system -- and they should likewise consider the wisdom of making that parole an unconditional pardon. 

Once again, my sincere thanks....

... to everyone who has donated to keep Pro Libertate up and running. The copies of Global Gun Grab should have arrived by now; in the event of an oversight, please contact me (WNGrigg[at]msn[dot]com) and I'll expedite the matter.

I will continue to send a copy of G3 (no, not that G3) to anyone who offers a donation of $10 or more. 

Thanks again, and God Bless!

Be sure to check out my weekly Pro Libertate Radio podcast at the Liberty News Radio network!










Dum spiro, pugno!

Clarence Dupnik's Death Squad

A home invasion in Tucson, Arizona; below, right, its equivalent in Mosul, Iraq.

 




















Why did they use a SWAT team? 

If  Tucson resident Jose Guerena was plausibly suspected of narcotics trafficking, why wasn't he arrested on his way to or from his job at the nearby Asarco Mission copper mine? What justified a military assault on his home, when investigators knew that they could have executed a conventional search warrant?

 Jose was never charged with a crime. In a previous encounter with police he consented to a search of his vehicle. In an separate traffic stop, Jose was a passenger in a car in which police found a handgun and a trivial amount of marijuana; he was arrested and subsequently released without being charged with a crime. He was an honorably discharged Marine combat veteran and -- of infinitely greater importance -- a gainfully employed, married father of two children. 

There's no reason to believe that anything other than a conventional search warrant -- served by officers who aren't kitted out in paramilitary drag, who knock on the door, identify themselves, and display the document in question before gaining entry -- was either necessary or appropriate. This could have been done with minimal risk to everyone involved. 

If a routine search warrant had been executed on the morning of May 5, the substantive result would have been the same: The police would have found no evidence of criminal activity. The most important difference, of course, would be that Vanessa would still have a husband, and her children -- grade school student Jose, Jr. , and toddler Joel -- would still have their father. Instead, Jose was a victim of criminal homicide at the hands of a Pima County Sheriff's Office (PCSO) SWAT team. 

At the time of the raid, Jose had just finished a twelve-hour shift at the local Asarco copper mine; he was startled awake by terrified cries from his wife, Vanessa, who told him that there were armed men laying siege to their home. Jose told her to hide in a closet with their four-year-old son, Joel. 

When the intruders burst into the home, Jose was in his boxer shorts and reportedly was holding an AR15 rifle, which he never discharged -- contrary to the SWAT team's initial report, which was that Jose had fired on them. His wife, who claims that she had never seen the gun before, initially told investigating detectives that it had been "thrown" next to Jose's body. Whether or not Jose actually pointed the gun, the invaders flung a total of 71 rounds in his direction, twenty-two of which hit him. 

Significantly, none of the wounds, as described in the official Medical Examiner's report, appears to have been a killshot. Jose was grazed in the head, and wounded in the extremities. One round penetrated a lung and his spleen, causing a hemorrhage. The same report notes that there was "no evidence of medical intervention," despite the fact that one member of the SWAT team -- deputy Jay Korza -- is a medic, and paramedics summoned by Vanessa's panicked 911 call arrived at the home mere minutes after the shooting. 



Rather than rendering or permitting medical aid to their victim, the SWAT team barricaded the crime scene while Jose bled to death. They didn't even confirm Jose's death directly. Instead, they deployed a camera-equipped remote-controlled robot to investigate, and then obtained an official pronouncement by telephone from a SWAT team physician who was miles from the scene. 


The likelihood that Jose could have survived if the SWAT team had provided timely medical care elevates this crime from simple homicide to second degree murder through depraved indifference. But the guilty parties here aren't limited to the trigger-pullers who spilled Jose's blood: Given that there was no legal justification for a military raid in the first place, the policy-makers responsible for signing off on it are just as guilty as the people who carried out those orders.

In a petulant and self-serving television interview with local ABC affiliate KGUN, Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik insisted that the SWAT raid was entirely "appropriate," and that since Jose was "part of a very violent organization, we considered it high risk." 

As helmet camera video of the raid documents, the comportment of the  SWAT team was not what one would expect from police carrying out a "high risk" mission against a potentially violent criminal. Music can be heard playing in the background; the mood of the SWAT operators seems more like what would be expected of a sports team preparing for a pickup basketball game, rather than combat-ready tactical specialists steeling themselves to confront a dangerous offender. 


Furthermore, Dupnik's rationale for the "high risk" operation is contradicted by Michael Storie, the attorney representing Jose's killers. Asked if Jose's previous arrest played a role in the SWAT team's strategy in carrying out the raid, Storie replied: "No. They didn't know anything about it and they didn't even know Guerena would be in the house at the time they approached."


What this means, apparently, is that a SWAT team was sent to carry out a combat-style raid against a home the team believed was  occupied only by a young mother and her four-year-old child. The task force investigating Jose knew his work schedule and his family's daily routine; did it neglect to share that information with the SWAT team? Was that intelligence deliberately withheld?


Nothing was "mishandled" here, maintains Sheriff Dupnik, ignorant of the fact that once incompetence is eliminated as an explanation, we're left with something can only be regarded as sinister -- and criminal.

 The public shouldn't be alarmed over the raid that killed Jose Guerena, the Sheriff assured KGUN, since "We average about 50 of these searches" every year. Wouldn't this mean that there is a SWAT raid of this kind taking place practically every week in Pima County? In light of what happened on May 5, should Pima County residents receive these tidings with relief, or apprehension?


"This was an unfortunate situation that was provoked by the person himself," Dupnik maintained, asserting that this is the inevitable outcome when someone points an "assault rifle" at cops. A more honest person would acknowledge that the SWAT operators first pointed their weapons at Jose when they had no cause or justification to do so, and that it's always a bad idea to invade a home occupied by a young mother with a toddler. 

Dupnik, however, was too busy wallowing in self-pity to spare any sympathy for the young father who was slaughtered on the floor of his own home: "Unfortunately, in this particular case, the printed media ... for whatever reason, decided to beat Dupnik up, over the head, with a sledge hammer...."


Sending a paramilitary death squad to bust down a door and hurl lead in every direction is conscientious police work; criticizing the synapse-challenged apparatchik responsible for such atrocities is something akin to criminal assault. Is everybody clear on this? 

Dupnik's casually defamatory statement that Jose Guerena was part of a "very violent organization" isn't supported by evidence, and will never be proven in court. Since Jose was killed before being charged with a crime, his innocence will forever remain an unimpeachable legal fact. However, it is a moral certainty that Clarence Dupnik is the chieftain of a "very violent organization" that can kill innocent people with impunity.

The search warrant affidavit that lead to the May 5 raids in Tucson -- a tapestry of supposition held together by begged questions -- purports to describe a large, well-organized narcotics smuggling operation involving Jose's older brother and other relatives. 

The PCSO's Special Investigative Unit (SIU) investigated Jose and the others for about two years, including six months of relentless, highly intrusive surveillance. This included wiretaps, stakeouts, and detailed scrutiny of household finances. The central figure in the investigation appears to have been Jose's older brother, Alejandro, who did have a criminal history (albeit one not involving mala en se). 

Suspicions were piqued by the fact that this group of Mexican-Americans, most of whom received welfare, appeared to be living beyond their means -- which, while exceedingly unwise, is neither a crime nor uncommon, even in post-Bubble America. Jose, according to his wife, was the kind of frugal provider who made birthday pinatas for their son, rather than buying them. The affidavit insists that none of the subjects appeared to be gainfully employed. That statement is offered despite the fact that the same affidavit acknowledges that Jose, who retired from the Marine Corps several years ago, worked long hours at the copper mine.


Despite the depth of their suspicions and the extent of their investigation, the affidavit admits: "During the SIU surveillance concerning the aforementioned subjects [that is, Jose and the others], they were not observed handling or even in the proximity of narcotics."

The functionary who filed the affidavit, identified only as "Detective Tisch,"offers a litany of excuses for the absence of tangible evidence of the drug trafficking ring he and his comrades had purportedly identified. 

Some "drug traffickers are aware that electronic communications are subject to law enforcement interception ... [and therefore] prefer most transactions to be in person," he writes in lines 123-124 of the affidavit. Where and when did those transactions occur? Ahem -- well, you see, "it is your Affiant's belief ... that suspects who are involved in drug trafficking are aware that law enforcement officers conduct surveillance of their residences, their businesses, and their activities" -- so none of the deals would go down in any of those places, y'see. 

Well, why not stalk those insidious people to the secret lairs wherein they ply their insidious trade? Ah, gee, well, as much as I'd love to, Tisch stammers in print, drug dealers "are conscious of being followed by law enforcement officers and are therefore difficult to follow." All right  -- what about the fact that the SIU had terrifyingly detailed access to the financial records of those whom they were investigating? "Narcotic traffickers often use financial habits designed to minimize and hide a paper trail," Tisch wrote by way of prefacing information about the earnings, finances, employment histories, properties, and clothing purchases of Jose and Alejandro Guerena and the others. 

The most significant "evidence" of Jose's supposed involvement in the alleged drug ring was the fact that he was found in the possession of a large quantity of plastic wrap during a 2009 traffic stop. In a fashion reminiscent of Don Quixote seeing malevolent giants where windmills placidly plied the Iberian skies, Detective Tisch wrote that "it is your Affiant's belief that saran-type wrap is commonly used to wrap and rewrap marijuana for ease of transportation...." It was subsequently discovered that this illicit "masking material" had actually been used to wrap furniture at the home of Jose Guerena's mother. 


After paring away all of the officious persiflage that litters this document, here is the "evidence" is presented to the judge: 

This small group of Mexican-Americans in Tucson, who include some people with criminal records, has money and assets we believe, but cannot prove, are the proceeds of drug trafficking. The only way we can prove this is by deploying a military strike force to kick in doors and collect the evidence that we cannot find through legitimate police methods. A judge quite generously responded to that request by issuing a hunting license to the local SWAT team and calling it a "search warrant." 


The affidavit demanded permission to seize all "fruits, instrumentalities and evidence of the [drug-related] crimes" allegedly carried out by the purported marijuana trafficking ring. 
Although the PCSO "rip crew" found no evidence of any kind in Jose's home, they were nothing if not thorough: Among the supposedly "drug-related" items they plundered from the home were Vanessa's wedding ring and Jose's combat medals from his service in Iraq. 


Once again, this detail offers critical insights into the mindset and priorities behind the May 5 atrocity. This wasn't the behavior of people sworn to protect individual rights and private property; it was the opportunistic avarice of officially sanctioned thieves who consider themselves legally entitled to a cut of anything of value they can find. 

This is why Detective Tisch's affidavit (like any other document of its kind) should be seen as a report filed by a thief casing coveted properties on behalf of a home invasion ring: These people have a bunch of nice stuff; all we have to do is find a plausible excuse to steal it from them. 

 That's how the "War on Drugs" operates at the local level. For law enforcement agencies, the objective isn't to abolish drug trafficking, or even to impede it significantly; rather, it is to maximize the institutional profits they derive from prohibition. 

One properly notorious example is on display on Interstate 40 in Tennessee, where officers from two drug task forces prowl the highway in search of  cash they can seize through civil asset forfeiture.


Dutifully reciting the prescribed catechism, Kim Helper, District Attorney for Tennessee's 21st Judicial District, insists that the highway robbery scheme is "a way for us to continue to fund our operations so that we can put an end to drug trafficking and the drug trade within this district." Of course, those two objectives -- "continued funding" and "an end to drug trafficking" -- are mutually incompatible. 

Officers assigned to the task force often ignore actual narcotics shipments, choosing instead to focus almost exclusively on seizing money. This means concentrating on the westbound side of the highway, where the cash is believed to be found, rather than the eastbound lane, which is supposedly used to shuttle drugs in from Mexico. 

As Nashville's CBS affiliate reports, the salaries paid to the officers involved in this highway robbery ring are paid directly out of the cash and other assets seized by them; this means that police often find themselves competing to stop and shake down the same cars, sometimes nearly coming to blows in the process. 

The Patron Saint of narcotics task forces is 19th Century NYPD Officer Alexander "Clubber" Williams, who created an immensely lucrative fiefdom in a precinct ripe with vice and graft of every conceivable variety. 

Clubber's exuberant corruption made for good press copy, which was made even livelier by his compulsive quotability. "There is more law in the end of a policeman's nightstick than in a decision of the Supreme Court," he explained when he was criticized about his penchant for brutality. It was his proprietary brand of glib shamelessness that gave New York's vice district its name: "All my life I have never had anything but chuck steak. Now I'm gonna get me some tenderloin." 

Like the contemporary drug warriors who are his institutional progeny, Williams knew that vice cannot be eradicated through state coercion -- but that the "war" against it can be immensely profitable. As Professor Alfred W. McCoy of the University of Wisconsin-Madison points out, through drug prohibition, police act as "an informal regulator, controlling the volume of vice trading and setting the level of syndication"; this results in the creation of "powerful syndicates and a high volume of illicit activity." 

To see a splendid example of the process Dr. McCoy describes, all that is necessary is to cast our eyes to the south. Since 2006, the Mexican front of Washington's drug war has claimed more than 40,000 lives. It has militarized that country's law enforcement culture, thereby generating substantial profits for the corporate affiliates of Washington's National Security State. The inflated profits resulting from prohibitionist policies have likewise been a boon to the banking sector, both in Mexico and globally. The cartels themselves are thriving, diversifying, and expanding their institutional reach both into the U.S. and Central America.

This symbiosis police agencies and the vice cartels they help create enriches criminal kingpins on both sides. The consequences of this cynical charade are often lethal for innocent people needlessly targeted by  State-licensed thugs armed with combat-grade weaponry and imbued with the scruples of Clubber Williams.


The second hour of last week's installment of Pro Libertate Radio was devoted to the murder of Jose Guerena. Go here to listen.










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Dum spiro, pugno!