Presidential Dictatorship: Not Thinking Things Through

He sees the flaw in your logic: Lucius Fox

Let me get this straight: You think that your client, one of the wealthiest, most powerful men in the world, is secretly a vigilante who spends his nights beating criminals to a pulp with his bare hands -- and your plan is to blackmail this person?... Good luck.

Bruce Wayne's confidante and tech adviser Lucius Fox, confronting accountant Coleman Rose when the number-cruncher tries to expose Batman's secret identity. 

Some of Barack Obama's most impassioned conservative critics see him as an incipient dictator bent on radically transforming the United States into a socialist dystopia through the exercise of unfiltered executive power.

Many of those same critics denounce Obama for being insufficiently ruthless in using arbitrary presidential power to kill and imprison people. Their plan, apparently, is to goad that incipient dictator into becoming a fully realized despot. 

Writing in Investor's Business Daily, attorney Ernest S. Christian and economist Gary A. Robbins -- the former a veteran of the Ford administration, the latter a Reagan administration alumnus -- tidily encapsulate the conservative Republican critique of Obama the embryonic dictator:

"Too many overreaching laws give the president too much discretion over too many aspects of our lives. There's no end to the harm an out-of-control president can do.... [Barack Obama] is undermining our constitutional traditions: The rule of law and our Anglo-Saxon concepts of private property hang in the balance. Obama may be the most 'consequential' president ever."

In fact, Obama is nothing less than "an alien in the White House," they write, borrowing an expression coined by Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Wall Street Journal. 

"A wounded rampaging president can do much damage -- and, like Caesar, the evil he does will live long after he leaves office, whenever that might be," they continue. There is even the possibility that Obama would remain in office in defiance of law and the will of the electorate, since the "overgrown, un-pruned power of the presidency to reward, punish and intimidate may now be so overwhelming that his re-election in 2012 is already assured -- Chicago-style."

The authors appear to believe that the formidable powers exercised by Obama somehow originated with him -- or, at very least, that Republican occupancy of the White House immunizes the office against depravity.

While painting Obama as a singular threat to liberty and Bill Clinton as a degenerate who "lowered the culture" of an electorate that twice elected him, they insist that "George W. Bush stood up for America, albeit sometimes clumsily." 

Translated into Roman terms, the authors would have us believe that Clinton was the corrupt, self-absorbed adolescent Elagabalus, and Obama either the depraved Nero or the despotic Diocletian -- but Bush the Younger, heck, he was Claudius, a relatively well-intentioned, albeit physically maladroit and verbally challenged, legitimate heir.

In fact, Obama is not materially different from his predecessor in any significant way. Mssrs. Christian and Robbins depict Obama as a unique threat to our "Anglo-Saxon" tradition of liberty protected by law. But it was Bush -- acting under the influence of his Sith Master, Dick Cheney -- who disemboweled the habeas corpus guarantee, the foundation of common law protections of individual rights. Granted, Obama has embraced and enlarged on Bush's actions, but the damage was done before the "alien" occupied the Oval Office. 

Brutum hominis cum Imperator

Perhaps Christian and Robbins intend to intimate that the threat Obama poses to the "Anglo-Saxon" tradition is a matter of identity, rather than performance, given that the chief damage was done by Bush the All-American Boy, rather than Obama the "alien."

During the reign of Bush the Lesser, Marc Thiessen -- now enjoying a sinecure at the American Enterprise Institute -- was one of the Imperator's scriptwriters. Since the end of that regime, Thiessen has continue to evangelize on behalf of torture, murder by executive decree, and other key tenets of the Bush-Cheney doctrine of totalitarian presidential power.


Thiessen has done nothing to conceal his disdain for the incumbent president; he is firmly in the camp of those who see Obama as a subversive and aspiring tyrant. Yet in a recent Washington Post column, Thiessen called for that same neo-Leninist to employ extraordinary means to abduct WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.


"Assange is a non-U.S. citizen operating outside the territory of the United States," observes Thiessen. "This means the government has a wide range of options for dealing with him. It can employ not only law enforcement but also intelligence and military assets to bring Assange to justice  [sic] and put his criminal syndicate out of business."

This could mean sending a CIA or even a military team to snatch Assange off the streets of Iceland, Belgium, or other friendly countries unwilling to surrender him to Washington, Thiessen insists. It also means using the newly created U.S. CyberCommand to interdict WikiLeaks' access to the Web: "With a stroke of his pen, the president can authorize USCYBERCOM to protect American and allied forces by eliminating WikiLeaks' ability to disseminate classified information that puts their lives at risk," Thiessen insists.
 
In other words, Thiessen is eager to see the dreaded Obama deploy kidnapping teams and throw the internet "kill switch," and will hector him mercilessly until he does -- making sure to season those critiques of presidential weakness with dire regarding what he has described as Obama's despotic designs.

Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy, Thiessen's comrade at National Review, likewise laments the supposed fact that Barack Obama -- whom he has described as a "neo-communist" -- has been diffident and tentative in exercising presidential power.

In an address last March in an event sponsored by Hillsdale College, McCarthy chided Obama for not emulating Andrew Jackson's example as military governor of New Orleans during the War of 1812.

On December 15, 1814 -- shortly before the storied "Battle of New Orleans" -- Jackson issued a decree announcing that it was his "unalterable determination rigidly to execute the martial law in all cases which should come before [my] province." The city would be run as an armed camp. A 9:00 PM curfew was imposed, and anyone found on the streets after that hour would "be apprehended as spies and held for examination."

Following the battle -- regarded as the only significant American victory, although the War of 1812 had already ended -- Jackson refused to restore civilian government. In March, nearly two months after the climactic battle,  a member of the Louisiana senate named Louis Louailler published an anonymous letter in the Louisiana Courier condemning the continued state of martial law as an affront to "our oath of making the Constitution respected."

"It is high time the laws should resume their empire," wrote Senator Louailler, who also demanded that the dozens of civilians held in military custody be brought before civilian courts and either charged or released.

As if anticipating Andrew Johnson's Reconstruction-era dictum -- "Whenever you hear a man prating about the Constitution, spot him as a traitor" -- Jackson treated this invocation of the U.S. Constitution as the act of a British spy.

He first commissioned publication of a propaganda sheet called Friend of the Laws that pointedly warned New Orleans residents that those found guilty of "espionage" within the "armed camp" would be subject to immediate execution. He then dispatched agents to learn the identity of his anonymous critic and arrest him.


Once Louailler was in military custody, he was accused of acting with  "the direct and manifest object [of bringing] the military authority into contempt," as well as fomenting sedition by "stirring up discontent and mutiny in the camp" -- meaning the City of New Orleans.

Jackson's critics had a point.

Some of Louailler's constituents filed an appeal with U.S. District Judge Dominick Augustin Hall, who issued a writ of habeas corpus.

"Instead of responding to the writ as directed," McCarthy admiringly recalls, Jackson "had Judge Hall arrested." Jackson charged the judge of "aiding[,] abetting, and executing mutiny within the camp" and threw him into the same cell holding Louailler. Shortly thereafter, Judge Hall was marched a short distance outside the "camp" and released.

A few weeks later, Louailler -- a civilian legislator -- was subjected to a court martial on numerous charges, including espionage, "illegal and improper conduct," "disobedience to orders," and "writing a willful and corrupt libel."

To his credit, Louallier refused to recognize the jurisdiction of that spurious court, and also rejected an offer of amnesty "by which they had sought to brand me a criminal." He spent years working to restore his reputation.

Alas, sighs McCarthy, "We've come a long way from Andrew Jackson to Barack Obama" -- the latter, presumably, a timid milquetoast scandalously unwilling to punish dissent through summary imprisonment, and exile judges who object to such abuses of due process.

My question to McCarthy would be this: Do you really want Obama to exercise those powers? Would we really be better off if Obama -- the incumbent "wartime Commander-in-Chief" -- treated criticism of his actions as sedition, arrested his critics, and imprisoned judges who issued writs demanding that the government justify its actions?

Jackson repays former allies: The Cherokee "Trail of Tears."

As it happens, Obama's behavior in office isn't that far removed from the totalitarian ideal espoused by Thiessen, McCarthy, and their ilk.


The indefatigable -- and entirely irreplaceable -- Glenn Greenwald of Salon points out that the Obama administration, building on the precedents set by Thiessen and McCarthy's former boss, has created a "hit list" of people subject to summary execution on presidential orders. This includes several U.S. citizens, prominent among them the radical Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaki.

When Awlaki's father -- working with the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights -- filed an emergency appeal for an injunction to prevent the extra-judicial state murder of his son, "a significant and extraordinary problem arose," notes Greenwald: Regulations issued by the Treasury Department under the Bush administration "prohibit U.S. persons from engaging in any transactions with individuals labeled by the Government as `Specially Designated Global Terrorists,' and those regulations specifically bar lawyers from providing legal services to such individuals without a special `license' from the Treasury Department specifically allowing such representation."

"On July 16, roughly two weeks after Awlaki's father retained the ACLU and CCR to file suit, the Treasury Department slapped that label on Awlaki," Greenwald continues. "That action would have made it a criminal offense for those organizations to file suit on behalf of Awlaki or otherwise provide legal representation to him without express permission from the U.S. Government."


Timothy Geithner, the career criminal in charge of the Treasury Department, has condescended to issue the requested license, thereby permitting Awlaki's father to press his legal challenge. This also preserves the supposed authority of the executive branch to grant or deny -- on any whimsical basis it considers appropriate -- permission to attorneys seeking to defend the legal rights of people on the president's "kill list."

Last January, after Awlaki was accused of inciting the attempted Christmas bombing of Northwest Flight 253, his father was asked why he didn't encourage his son to return to the United States to confront the charges.

"I will do my best to convince my son to do this," Awlaki told CNN, but he understandably doesn't trust a government that claims the right to execute his son without trial -- or even formal criminal charges.

"They want to kill my son," he pointed out. "How can the American government kill one of their own citizens?"

The unsettling answer to that troubling question is one terrifying word: "easily." Obama's conservative critics want to make this task even easier still. They really haven't thought this through, have they?

    Postscript, August 5: On the subject of the "Alien in the White House"....

This is the kind of thing that threatens to eliminate the ever-narrowing gap between life and parody that sustains The Onion's existence: 

The head of an eastern Pennsylvania amusement company has yanked a carnival game in which players shot foam darts at an image resembling President Barack Obama.

Irvin Good Jr. pulled the target-shooting game after receiving a complaint from a Massachusetts woman attending a fair in Roseto, about 65 miles north of Philadelphia. Good said Wednesday his company, Hellertown-based Goodtime Amusements, won't offer the game again.

"It was just a big, big mistake in judgment, and I feel sorry about it," he told The Associated Press. "I can't take it back, but I can try to make it better."

The game, dubbed "Alien Attack," featured a large painted image of a black man wearing a belt buckle with the presidential seal and holding a scroll labeled "Health Bill." Players could win prizes such as stuffed animals by hitting targets on the image's head and heart.

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Dum spiro, pugno!

Rubicon in the Rear-View, Part III: En Route to Military Rule (Updated, 12/27)

The military occupation of New Orleans, post-Katrina.


Safety from external danger is the most powerful director of national conduct. Even the ardent love of liberty will, after a time, give way to its dictates. The violent destruction of life and property incident to war, the continual effort and alarm attendant on a state of continual danger, will compel nations the most attached to liberty to resort for repose and security to institutions which have a tendency to destroy their civil and political rights. To be more safe, they at length become willing to run the risk of being less free.

Federalist Paper No. 8, in which Alexander Hamilton displayed an atypical ardor to defend liberty against state power.



“We no longer have a civilian-led government.”


This ominous conclusion comes to us from Thomas A. Schweich, who held the title of deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement affairs in the Bush Regime, by way of a December 21 Washington Post op-ed column. Lamenting “the silent military coup d’etat that has been steadily gaining ground below the radar screen of most Americans and the media,” Schweich describes the infusion of the military “into a striking number of aspects of civilian government” as “the most unnerving legacy of the Bush administration.”


Schweich is not an advocate of limited-government who managed to burrow deeply into the Bu’ushist Welfare/Warfare State; he is an advocate of “soft power” imperialism, the supposedly benign variety that focuses more on hectoring foreigners about their shortcomings, rather than unceremoniously bombing them into blood pudding. Oh, sure – even “soft power” imperialism involves the threat and occasional practice of bombing, but usually only amid cries of anguished reluctance following the performance of the proper multilateralist sacraments. (For useful examples, consult the Clinton-era bombing campaigns in the former Yugoslavia.)



Schweich seems particularly miffed that the military shouldered aside the State Department’s efforts to train civilian “law enforcement” personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the Pentagon’s habit of Bogarting all of the boodle set aside for “reconstruction” projects.



But even though his protests have the sectarian flavor of bureaucratic in-fighting, Scweich validates his shocking announcement of the demise of civilian government with some very solid examples. For instance, the military’s domination of law enforcement training in Iraq and Afghanistan have created police forces that “have been unnecessarily militarized – producing police officers who look more like militia members than ordinary beat cops. These forces now risk becoming paramilitary groups, well armed with US equipment, that could run roughshod” over civilian governments.



While this and other “military takeovers of civilian functions” took place “a long distance from home,” Schweich elaborates, the same all-devouring militarism is at work here as well.



Witness the huge and expanding role played by the military in narcotics enforcement, including the hugely expensive “Merida Initiative” through which the Bush Regime has collaborated with Mexico’s narcotics syndicates (which are, to use a common term on this side of the border, public-private partnerships) to propagate unprecedented violence and misery in that country.



The most important example Schweich lists is the Pentagon’s plan “to deploy 20,000 U.S. soldiers inside our borders by 2011, ostensibly to help state and local officials respond to terrorist attacks or other catastrophes. But that mission could easily spill over from emergency counterterrorism work into border-patrol efforts, intelligence gathering and law enforcement efforts – which would run smack into the Posse Comitatus Act…. So the generals are not only dominating our government activities abroad, at our borders and in Washington, but they also seem to intend to spread out across the heartland of America.”



While Schweich’s concern and candor do him credit, his warnings are tantamount to urging that we secure the barn door long after the prize stallion has fled, been butchered, and graced a Frenchman’s dinner table.



The military “spill-over” into domestic law enforcement that he warns against began as a trickle in 1981 with passage of the Military Cooperation with Civilian Law Enforcement Act. That trickle is now a cascade as voluminous and consistent of any found in Niagara Falls. Once again, this is chiefly – but not entirely – due to the so-called War on Drugs.












The eyes of the military are upon you: Active-duty military personnel collect photographs of anti-war activists during a 2002 Washington, D.C. protest against the then-impending Iraq war (above and below right).


For some time, military involvement in domestic intelligence gathering has included personal surveillance of political activists; more recently, this has expanded to the use of spy satellites to monitor political protests on behalf of militarized law enforcement bodies. While Schweich is properly alarmed by the way the Pentagon has created Iraqi and Afghan police forces that are little more than miniature armies of occupation, he apparently hasn’t noticed that the same process is well underway here in the United States as well.



In some ways, Schweich’s jeremiad is a good update and companion piece to Brig. Gen. Charles J. Dunlap’s prescient essay “The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012,” published in the Winter 1992-93 issue of the U.S. Army War College journal Parameters.



Written in the form of a smuggled prison letter composed by “Prisoner 222305759,” condemned to death for “treason” by the American military junta of Gen. E.T. Brutus, Dunlap’s essay described many trends that he feared would culminate in “a military that controls [the American] government and one that, ironically, can’t fight.”



As government corruption and ineptitude grew, “The one institution of government in which people retained faith was the military,” explained Dunlap’s literary stand-in. The military was thus burdened with countless tasks unrelated to warfare – from law enforcement, to supplementing the work of doctors and teachers, from environmental preservation efforts to bolstering the financially stricken airline industry. (Dunlap, incidentally, extensively documents how the military was either active, or planning to become involved, in all of those missions by the early 1990s.)



Likewise, the military’s missions abroad were increasingly Operations Other Than War (OOTW), a term that came into vogue subsequent to publication of Dunlap’s essay. At the same time, a cultural dissonance grew between the military and the public it was supposedly serving.



The structural defects in this new model military were displayed to painful effect in what the author describes (by way of prediction, remember) as “the wretched performance of our forces in the Second Gulf War,” particularly following Iran’s intervention in 2010: “Preoccupation with humanitarian duties, narcotics interdiction, and all the rest of the peripheral missions left the military unfit to engage an authentic military opponent.”



While the military was no longer well-suited to fight and win wars (including, of course, patently unjust wars of aggression), its subtle and thoroughgoing integration into every element of domestic life made it perfectly suited to carry out a coup: “Eventually, people became acclimated to seeing uniformed military personnel patrolling their neighborhood. Now troops are an adjunct to almost all police forces in the country. In many of the areas where much of our burgeoning population of elderly Americans live – [military dictator] Brutus calls them `National Security Zones’ – the military is often the only law enforcement agency. Consequently, the military was ideally positioned in thousands of communities to support the coup.”



Very little of consequence separates the speculative world described by Dunlap from the one in which we presently live. One institutional impediment is the Posse Comitatus Act (or whatever remains of it), which was intended to prevent direct involvement of the military in domestic law enforcement.



But this measure, which was always a tissue-paper barricade at best, is all but extinct as we near the end of the Bush era. And the ranks of military scholars are planted thickly with people devising arguments to destroy whatever may remain of the Posse Comitatus proscriptions.



In a paper published by the US Army War College in early 2006, Lt. Col. Mark C. Weston of the U.S. Air Force Reserve points out that the Posse Comitatus Act has been perforated with “exceptions” practically since it was passed in 1878. (Just weeks after signing the act – passage of which was part of a deal that ensured his presidency -- Rutherford B. Hayes deployed the Army to carry out police functions in New Mexico.)



One of the biggest exceptions deals with what could be called the use of “civilian” police as military proxies, since the Pentagon is permitted “to provide equipment, transportation, training, supplies, and services to law enforcement officials as long as it does not directly and actively participate in law enforcement tasks,” writes Weston. Which is to say that it’s permissible to militarize the police, as long as troops aren’t actually the ones pulling triggers and conducting arrests. This is, once again, exactly the same procedure being used to create the Afghan and Iraqi “militias” described by Thomas Schweich.



There are six formal exceptions to the Posse Comitatus Act listed in Title 32, Sec. 215.4 of the Code of Federal Regulations, Weston writes. To that list, he rather audaciously adds “One final exception worthy of discussion [namely] the concept of martial law.” Referring to the Supreme Court’s 1866 Ex Parte Milligan decision, Weston insists that martial law can properly be said to exist only in “the absence of order, courts, and constitution…. Martial law is the use of force by the military to maintain order by acting as the police, the court, and the legislature…. If the courts are open then [use of the term] martial law is not appropriate.”



Most domestic deployments of the military don't cross the threshold of martial law, Weston maintains, and he eagerly recommends making it easier for the military to carry out such missions by repealing the Posse Comitatus Act (or PCA). From Weston’s perspective, the PCA, which was never a good idea, has long since fallen into desuetude. He insists that the Act should either be repealed outright or modified in such a fashion as to make it entirely inconsequential.



Posse Comitatus, Weston writes, is “a significant obstacle to unified action on homeland security … an impediment to agility and adaptability of the military to national defense … [a hindrance to] national values and national purpose.” Yet he prefers to “modify” the Act rather than abolish it, apparently to maintain – for now – the useful fiction that military and police powers remain separate, with civilian officials firmly in control of the former.



In an October 2000 essay entitled “The Myth of Posse Comitatus,” Major Craig T. Trebilcock, a JAG officer in the U.S. Army Reserve offers an assessment quite similar to that of Lt. Col. Weston: The PCA is useless but not harmless, and best ignored if it can’t be dispensed with.



The only value of the PCA, according to Trebilcock, is the fact that “it remains a deterrent to prevent the unauthorized deployment of troops at the local level in response to what is purely a civilian law enforcement matter.” For example, it can result in administrative punishment or even criminal prosecution of “a lower-level commander who uses military forces to pursue a common felon or to conduct sobriety checkpoints off of a federal military post.”



As of December 12 – when active-duty U.S. Marines conducted a joint highway sobriety checkpoint with California Highway Patrol officers – that example can be crossed off Trebilcock’s list.



In his book An Empire Wilderness, Robert D. Kaplan describes a strategic planning session held at Ft. Leavenworth’s Battle Command Training Program shortly after the April 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing (a tragedy directly facilitated by several of the Regime’s three-letter agencies). One of the participants, a Marine Major named Craig Tucker, predicted that the threat of terrorism and domestic turmoil suggested that the military would have to “go domestic.”
















God forgive us, if He can: Iraqi mourners display the lifeless body of an infant killed during a chemical weapons attack by US occupation troops. The burn marks on the child's body are the result of an attack using white phosphorous munitions. In a 1932 essay on domestic military deployments, Gen. George S. Patton -- who ironically took care to avoid needless civilian casualties during World War II -- recommended the use of white phosphorous to suppress insurrection.



While that prediction has been fulfilled, the process has yet to be fully consummated. On the continuum described by none other than Gen. George S. Patton – who considered domestic military deployment as the “most distasteful” form of service – we are presently somewhere between routine involvement of military personnel “in connection with Domestic Disturbances” and “Martial Law.” That continuum ends with “Military Government,” which differs from Martial Law in that it represents the complete abolition of civilian authority, as opposed to the enforcement of a civilian ruling elite’s will through direct military force.



In administering either Martial Law or Military Government, Patton – predictably enough – prescribed the pitiless application of lethal force. He digested his doctrine of domestic military missions into what he called “The Law and the Prophets of Riot Duty,” a canon that includes the following directives:



*“Take no orders from civil officials -- federal, state, or municipal.”



*“You may and should cooperate with police or state troops who may be present; but you and not they are the judge of the amount and character of this cooperation.”



*“Should some orator start haranguing the crowd and inciting them to violence, grab him even if it brings on a local, small fight. Small fights are better than big ones. Words cunningly chosen change crowds into mobs.”



*“Warn newspapers, theaters, and churches that if they encourage the mob, they are guilty of aiding them and that their leaders will be held personally accountable. Freedom of the press cannot be construed as `license to encourage’ the armed enemies of the United States of America. An armed mob resisting federal troops is an armed enemy. To aid an enemy is TREASON. This may not be the `law,’ but it is fact. When blood starts running, the law stops.”



*“If you have captured a dangerous agitator and some `misguided’ federal judge issues a writ of Habeas Corpus for him, try to see the judge to find out what he is liable to do…. There’s always the danger that the man might attempt to escape. If he does, see that he at least falls out of ranks before you shoot him. To be soft hearted might mean death to your men. After all, WAR IS WAR.”



*“As in all military operations, information is vital. By the use of detectives, soldiers in civilian clothes, and friendly citizens, get all possible information about the condition within the city.”



*“The use of gas is paramount…. While tear gas is effective, it should be backed up with vomiting gas.”



*"Although white phosphorous is incendiary, it is useful in forming a screen for the attack of barricades and defended houses.”




*“If you must fire, DO A GOOD JOB. A few casualties become martyrs; a large number becomes an object lesson.”



These admonitions, remember, were issued with respect to the use of military force against American citizens by a man revered as a patriotic hero by millions (including some lately given to second thoughts) – and who, ironically enough, was almost certainly assassinated by the same State he served with such ruthlessness.



Patton's model for a domestic counter-insurgency "war" during the last depression would probably resemble the approach used by the military in dealing with serious internal upheaval in the depression that has just begun.



Significantly, Patton’s tactics track very closely with those employed to enforce US occupation of Iraq – including the use of hideous white phosphorous munitions. That occupation is supposedly slated to end in 2011 – the same year, incidentally, when the military’s 20,000-man Homeland Security force is supposed to be fully deployed.



If the conclusion voiced by Thomas Schweich and other very credible analysts is correct – if, indeed, we are living under a de facto military junta , the nature of which will become clear as the economic collapse strips away all politically comfortable pretenses – we may soon learn, in the most painful way possible, that our military missions abroad have been carefully training the occupation force that will extinguish whatever remains of our liberty.


Update: Are you prepared to be "quelled" by the military?


In the installment immediately preceding this one ("`Question 46,' Revisited"), I mentioned a DUI/license checkpoint carried out recently as a joint effort by the California Highway Patrol and personnel from the Marine combat station at Twentynine Palms, California. The Marines were supposedly on hand as mere "observers."


That explanation struck me as implausible, or at least insufficient. Of course, there is a sense in which Marines, or other military personnel, could be invited to participate in ordinary law enforcement operations both to "observe" and to intimidate. This is illustrated by a letter published last July in the Colorado Springs Independent, which is reproduced below in full:


I feel compelled to notify fellow citizens of what is now occurring during the early morning hours in our downtown streets. This past Friday, July 11, after an evening at Rum Bay, I was met with an unexpected and disturbing sight. It was not the ever-increasing number of police officers that I found so disturbing. It was the three Fort Carson Army soldiers in full camo, armed with 9mm handguns, standing in the middle of Tejon Street with Colorado Springs police as people exited the night clubs.

I knew instantly what was occurring, but delayed my departure to watch and confirm my suspicions. After 30 minutes I approached an officer and inquired, "With all due respect, sir, why do we have armed soldiers in our streets?" He smirked slightly and responded in a more serious tone, "There are people that do certain things that need to be stopped; we started a program with the local base to bring some soldiers out with us to quell those things that go on ... even just their presence has a quelling effect."

That confirmed my suspicion: It was solely to create a sense of fear and intimidate the people under direction of the CSPD.

The Posse Comitatus Act was passed in 1878 to prevent our military from being used for general civilian police activities. Since the U.S. Patriot Act, and the Defense Authorization Act, virtually all aspects of the Posse Act were overwritten but directed at events of large civil disobedience, natural disasters or terrorist threats.

On this evening there were no organized masses, just the normal instances of confrontation between random people. In short, what CSPD is doing is illegal, and the CSPD and our local government need to be `quelled' of thinking that such blatant violations of civil law can continue.

— Justin Blough
Colorado Springs

I suspect, but cannot prove -- yet -- that this kind of gradual but accelerating militarization of routine police functions is becoming quite commonplace, largely at the invitation of local law enforcement bodies.

(My emphatic thanks to Colorado Springs resident William Blair for bringing the letter to my attention.)






On sale now.













Dum spiro, pugno!

Martial Law: A License to Loot, a Permit to Plunder (Updated)

Breaking and entering: Where does this fit under the heading "To protect and serve"? A paramilitary "strike team" commits a felonious break-in of a home in the flood-ravaged Midwest.


Digging up the planted axioms that litter our ordinary conversations can be a revealing exercise. We learn how deeply rooted our supposedly free society has become in collectivist and militarist assumptions.

For example: How often do we hear or read language that draws a distinction between "police" and "civilians"?

Our republican framework of government supposedly prohibits the use of the military in domestic law enforcement. Yet if a police officer isn't a civilian, he of necessity must be considered some variety of soldier: He bears arms, belongs to a force organized in a military hierarchy, issues orders, and expects immediate obedience to his demands.


Police are supposedly civilian "peace officers," distinguished from the rest of the citizenry (to paraphrase Robert Peel) only by the fact that they are specially charged to protect the rights and property of the innocent as a permanent assignment, rather than an occasional necessity.


Yet when non-professional police officers are given "law enforcement" duties by local governments -- as in Gilbert, Arizona, where such people are part of a unit that can issue traffic citations and investigate accidents -- they are referred to as "civilian auxiliaries" of police departments. Again we see the critical distinction: The regular police are something other than civilians.


Roughly a year ago, USA Today reported that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had created a shortage of ammunition, leaving police and "civilians" at the back of the line. Annual police awards ceremonies across the country routinely honor not only law enforcement officers but "civilians" for various distinguished acts.


Cultivating a new crop of "law enforcement" officers: Teenagers participating in a summer police training program receive instructions from SWAT operators at a firing range.



And, significantly, it is very common for "civilians" to be charged with "disobeying an officer" even when no other alleged offense is involved. That charge makes little sense unless it is assumed not only that police exercise authority akin to military personnel, but that common civilians are at the bottom of the hierarchy. Were this actually a country in which governments and their enforcement agencies derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, wouldn't it be possible to charge a police officer with "disobeying a citizen"?


As I mentioned above, these assumptions are usually buried and carefully ignored. But they are rudely exposed whenever crisis descends on a community and the familiar pretenses are blown away. Catastrophic natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina or this year's Midwestern floods are eagerly embraced by law enforcement agencies as a pretext for overtly exercising the kind of power that many of them covertly lust to employ all the time -- the power to regiment their communities at gunpoint under a form of martial law.


Think, once again, of the roots of that expression: "Martial" has its origin in the proper name Mars, referring to the pagan deity of -- what activity?


The term unmistakably refers to a military posture, or a state of war. It is the suspension of normal life via force majeure, resulting in rule by unalloyed force. And the capacity for rule of this kind is embedded in every law enforcement body in every community across the country, simply waiting for an excuse to manifest itself.


Many who reside in our flood-ravaged Midwest are learning, as residents of New Orleans did before them, that our paramilitary "protectors" will eagerly exploit disasters in ways that compound the suffering inflicted by a natural disaster. Many citizens in such circumstances prefer to stay in their homes, running their own risks in order to protect what is theirs. But it is
standard operating procedure for police -- aided, at times, by National Guardsmen -- to force such people out of their homes, and to use the force of arms to prevent those who have left from returning.


In the wake of the floodwaters in Iowa came all of the impedimentia of military occupation -- armed guards, checkpoints, detention areas. These strictures were imposed on communities already reeling from a deadly caprice of nature. Rather than permitting people to inspect their own property, "strike teams" that included armed police broke into locked homes, including the occasional occupied dwelling.


One Cedar Rapids homeowner, understandably outraged that a "strike team" had broken into his otherwise undamaged home, confronted them and made his feelings known in forceful but measured terms. This prompted police officer Josh Bell to threaten the homeowner with arrest for "harassing" the "strike team."


The business end of government "compassion": Armed "protectors" arrest Cedar Rapids homeowner Ricky Blazek at gunpoint (left, below).


That aggravated homeowner was relatively fortunate.


Fellow Cedar Rapids resident Ricky Blazek, one of several thousand flood victims reasonably infuriated by "checkpoints" preventing them from returning to their homes, tried to circumnavigate one such roadblock in his automobile. This resulted in Blazek being forced out of his car at gunpoint and arrested.


While the armed "strike teams" had unfettered access to homes of flood victims, and the media was given limited access in order to chronicle the supposed heroism of the government functionaries, homeowners basted in a seething broth of frustrated suspicion.


After all, would any thinking person feel secure knowing that government agents, freed by a natural disaster from the constraints of the pesky Fourth Amendment, had free rein to break into their homes and help themselves to anything they found therein?


Last year, the small town of Greensburg, Kansas was all but obliterated by a tornado of a ferocity not seen in the region since Dorothy Gale's house was rapted away to Oz and deposited rudely on top of Hillary Clinton's long-forgotten sister.


That's certainly more than enough for any town to suffer. However, the police establishment, displaying government's infallible gift for compounding tragedy, made matters immeasurably worse by barring residents from their homes and then selectively looting them for firearms (and, in some cases, jewelry and other valuables).

Gun Week reports that these thefts were made possible because officers "from various agencies" -- local and state police, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, FEMA, and the ATF -- "allegedly claimed that martial law had been imposed when it had not, and ordered all residents to leave the town."


Those residents who discovered the thefts and demanded the return of their firearms found them, in many cases, damaged to the point of being useless. A few opened gun cases only to discover that their firearms had been replaced with guns of inferior quality.


Bob Martin, an 83-year-old trap shooter, returned to his home the morning after the tornado to discover that several of his guns were missing. Like Ricky Blazek, Martin was originally barred access to his home by officers who claimed, falsely, that martial law had been declared by the municipal or state government. He was forced to take a circuitous route to his home; by the time he got there, his gun safe had been plundered.


After getting back several -- but not all -- of his guns (which had been damaged in police custody, Martin, along with his wife, moved out of Greensburg. He now regrets not shooting his way through the police barricade that kept him from defending his home and property.


"If I'd have known [that the martial law claim was a ruse, and the police were looting his gun collection], I had a gun of my own in the car, and I'd [have] loaded it and gone in," Martin says. "Ain't nobody going to keep me off my property."


Whatever it is that prompts a man in his ninth decade to take such a commendably militant stance toward the looters in blue, I earnestly hope it's contagious.


Provoked by the police crime wave that descended on tornado-ravaged Greenburg, the Kansas state legislature this year enacted HB 2280 (.pdf), a law that (per the official summary) "prohibits officials, during a declared state of emergency, from forcibly dispossessing an owner of any firearm not otherwise prohibited by law, or from requiring registration of firearms not required to be registered under state law."


Now, that bill was pockmarked with troubling qualifications (for instance, no peaceful and law-abiding citizen can properly be "prohibited by law" from owning any weapon he has the means to purchase and the skill to operate, "laws" holding otherwise notwithstanding). But the fundamental point here is of the "Well, duh" variety: Police shouldn't take advantage of natural disasters to steal firearms from citizens, any more than street crooks should capitalize on the opportunity to swipe consumer electronics from undefended retail stores.


Thus it is hugely significant that HB 2280, which only prohibits police from doing something they weren't authorized to do in the first place, was opposed by the Pratt County (Kansas) Sheriff, the Kansas Association of Chiefs of Police, and the Kansas Bureau of Investigation.


From their point of view, it's just not worth the trouble of having a natural disaster if the event can't be exploited to regiment local civilians and confiscate their firearms.


UPDATE: Submit or die....


Justin Raimondo of AntiWar.com offers the following capsule summary of the unpunished massacre of dozens of Iraqi civilians by a U.S. Marine unit in Haditha:


"When an IED killed one of his Marines, [SSgt. Frank] Wuterich and company shot everyone in the vicinity – including five unarmed men who were getting out of a taxi. Wuterich claims that the Iraqis disobeyed orders to stop and raise their hands over their heads, but others on the scene testify that they were complying and were shot anyway. Yet, whatever happened, Wuterich's working assumption – that the five harbored hostile intent toward him and his men – was and is undoubtedly correct. Because that's what imperialism is all about: occupying countries where you're hated by the locals, who are constantly trying to kill you. So naturally you get nervous and trigger-happy, and mistakes are made. That's the sort of war we're fighting and have to fight as long as we're in Iraq." (Emphasis added.)


Here we see how Iraqis living under an undisguised military occupation are expected -- on pain of summary execution -- to obey the orders of a foreign soldier. A variant of that mindset can be seen anytime an American citizen is arrested and charged with the supposed offense of "disobeying an officer's orders." And during periods of emergency rule, whether or not the condition is referred to as "martial law," those referred to as "civilians" in post-Katrina America can expect that they'll be treated with just a little bit more solicitude than Iraqis -- but not much.


Martial law, after all, is merely a military occupation conducted within our borders, rather than outside them.


And we should entertain no illusions about the fact that police agencies are deliberately re-tooling themselves into overtly military bodies. This can be clearly seen in -- among other things -- recruitment pitches like this one (courtesy of Radley Balko) from a SWAT team in Rome, Georgia.







Available now!












Dum spiro, pugno!

Slouching Toward Martial Law

Finally, about five months too late, some “respectable” people are beginning to understand the implications of what happened on October 17, when Bush doodled his signature onto two measures that effectively destroyed our republic.

The first was the Military Commissions Act, which effectively abolished habeas corpus and laid the foundation for a military tribunal system to try those designated “unlawful enemy combatants.” Those provisions apply primarily to non-citizens, but can be applied to U.S. Citizens. Key elements of that act were upheld yesterday by a federal court. And Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez has insolently stated that the ancient Anglo-Saxon principle of habeas corpus – which is literally the foundation of the American concept of due process of law – isn't protected by the Constitution.

The second republic-killer signed on October 17 was a provision in the Defense Authorization Act – call it the Martial Law Codicil -- permitting the president to seize control of state National Guard units for use in “natural or man-made disasters” -- the latter referring to disruptions of social order, including insurrection and rebellion or any activity the Regime chooses to describe as such. This measure revised two obscure but indispensable laws, the Insurrection Act of 1807 and the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878; those statutes provided a critical bulwark against the centralization and militarization of law enforcement.

In a house editorial a couple of days ago, the New York Times noted that because of what happened on October 17, the president can now “override local control of law enforcement and declare martial law” by using “military troops as a domestic police force.”

Some of us less-than-respectable folks pointed this out months ago.

What makes all of this “fit to print now” is the existence of a measure co-sponsored by Senators Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Christopher Bond of Missouri that would repeal the Martial Law Codicil. Exhausting its annual quota of sensible conclusions, the Times editorial board urges passage of the Leahy-Bond bill, which is the very least that must be done. The MCA should likewise be demolished immediately, and Senator Leahy has co-sponsored another measure – this one with Republican Arlen Specter – entitled the “Habeas Corpus Restoration Act of 2007” that would accomplish this, as well.

But the most important action that could be taken to prevent our descent into full-fledged despotism would be to prevent the war in Iraq from metastasizing into a regional conflict involving Iran. The Martial Law measures enacted last October make perfect sense as preparations for a broader and more painful war that would involve economic hardship, social upheaval, and at least a measure of regimentation.

“Try as I might, I cannot imagine martial law in the US, except as something the population would agree to under threat from...from whom?” writes liberal commentator Jane Smiley. “Correct me if I am wrong (I know you will), but the last time martial law was declared was during the Civil War, and Americans, though the threats to the Union were profound and omnipresent, didn't like it then. I can't even imagine what would happen now.”

Without minimizing the significance of last October's Martial Law provisions, Smiley continues, “I have to wonder who Bush, Cheney [et. al.] think they are governing. Were they planning to spring these things on us? One day, we were supposed to wake up, and martial law would be declared, and we were supposed to actually pay attention to it? Where are they keeping the troops who were going to patrol our neighborhoods? Who was it who was going to disarm the population? Who was their base going to be, when they sought public support for martial law? Who was going to round us up and where were they going to put us?”

These are eminently sensible questions that are relatively easy to answer. Let's take several of them in turn:

*Where are the troops who would patrol our neighborhoods? Well, some of them are already patrolling our neighborhoods. Those particular “troops” are from nominally local police departments that are appendages of the national Homeland Security system. As I pointed out not long ago, many of them are receiving material aid through the Pentagon's Law Enforcement Support Organization (LESO), including combat weaponry, armored personnel carriers, and other assets entirely incompatible with law enforcement operations – but entirely suitable for martial law.

In the event of martial law, militarized “local” police would work in tandem with National Guard units acting under presidential orders, as well as other elements of the Homeland Security apparatus: the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement would likely play a large role, as would federally subsidized mercenary outfits like Blackwater.

*Who will disarm the population? See the answer above. Recall as well that “local” police, backed by National Guard units, confiscated firearms in New Orleans when the city was placed under martial law following Hurricane Katrina.

*Who would support martial law? When examining the antic parade of authoritarian misfits constituting the “conservative” movement, the question becomes: Who among this sorry lot would not support martial law? When neo-Trotskyite fanatics like Frank Gaffney describe criticism of the Regime's escalation strategy (commonly called the “surge”) in Iraq as a literal hanging offense, and GOP-aligned “legal scholars” like Hugh Hewitt endorse assassination of civilians by presidential decree, why does it seem unlikely that martial law would find a constituency?

*Who will round us up, and were would we be put? To answer the first question, see the first bullet item above. The correct answer to the second question is: We would be put anywhere that's convenient for those doing the round-ups. And it should be understood that this has already happened, after a fashion, in any community that has been blighted by a presidential visit in the last several years. The mechanism used to provide “security” for those visits would serve the needs of martial law quite well.

“When President Bush travels around the United States, the Secret Service visits the location ahead of time and orders local police to set up `free speech zones' or `protest zones,' where people opposed to Bush policies (and sometimes sign-carrying supporters) are quarantined,” explains the irreplaceable James Bovard. Those who dare to display unapproved sentiments, either on signs or t-shirts, have been arrested and prosecuted.

The Feds command, and “local” police obey in the name of “presidential security.”

Furthermore, notes Bovard, these efforts to suppress protests “become more disturbing in light of the Homeland Security Department's recommendation that local police departments view critics of the war on terrorism as potential terrorists. In a May 9 [2003] terrorist advisory, the Homeland Security Department warned local law enforcement agencies to keep an eye on anyone who `expressed dislike of attitudes and decisions of the US government.' If police vigorously followed this advice, millions of Americans could be added to the official lists of terrorist suspects.”

Which is to say: If that view of dissent were taken literally, martial law would be considered a viable policy.

Bear in mind the date of that Homeland Security advisory; it was issued just weeks after the Regime began its war in Iraq. Should the war spread to Iran – as the Bu'ushists intend – it's reasonable to believe that dissenters would once again be viewed as gulag fodder.

This time, however, Bush would have the powers he arrogated to himself on October 17 – the ability to seize control of the National Guard, and to imprison – and torture – anyone he designates an “enemy combatant.”

Repealing the Martial Law measures is imperative, but the immediate task is to stop the Regime's plans for war with Iran.

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