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.

My thanks to everyone who has helped keep Pro Libertate up and running! While supplies last, I'm sending a copy of Global Gun Grab to anyone who donates $10 or more. Please use the PayPal button below, or contact me via e-mail (WNGrigg[at]MSN[dot]com). Thanks again, and God bless. 

Please tune in each Saturday afternoon from 4:00-6:00 Central Time for Pro Libertate Radio on the Liberty News Radio Network.








Dum spiro, pugno!

Support Your Local Army of Occupation

Boys and their toys: Members of the Malheur County (Oregon) SWAT team out having "fun."

"Wouldn't it be great if it were like this all the time?" commented a pleasant middle-aged gentleman as the two of us contemplated the large gathering of armed men in camouflage who had materialized in Payette's Centennial Park. "I feel really secure with these guys around."

"Actually, I'd feel much more secure if the guns were in the hands of people who aren't government employees," I replied, prompting a puzzled look from my new acquaintance.
 
Centennial Park is located just inside the Snake River boundary separating Idaho from Oregon. For reasons I've yet to learn, every time I visit the park to do calisthenics and sprints -- regardless of the hour of day -- I'll receive a visit from at least one police officer, who will typically do a very slow pass by my little exercise area while I'm huffing and sweating. 

On this particular afternoon, however, the park was literally swarming with camouflage-clad "police" from the Malheur County Sheriff's Department Emergency Response Team, in the company of at least one Payette County officer. They  arrived in a caravan of more than a half-dozen vehicles, one of which was pulling a trailer carrying a large motorboat. 

"Are you guys doing a training exercise?" I inquired of one fellow as he unpacked what appeared to be an AR-15.

"We're just playin,'" he replied with a perfunctory smile.

That response was quite similar to the description offered by SWAT team member Michael Hale of a training exercise conducted just a few weeks earlier just outside of Vale, Oregon.

"This is fun," the second-year officer told the Argus Observer. "This is what I did in the military. I get to shoot guns and play in the dirt. It is what I did as a kid. I just get paid for it now." 


Although the Malheur County SWAT team did play a backup role at a police roadblock during a recent carjacking episode, they spend most of their time arresting marijuana plants. On two occasions last summer, SWAT operators -- armed with assault rifles and with support from a helicopter crew -- were deployed to barren locations in rural Oregon to clear out marijuana grows, thereby doing their part in the federal government's "drug lord" price support program.

Malheur County's gorgeous Leslie Gulch.

An August 29 SWAT raid on an abandoned marijuana grow near Gold Creek harvested some 1,000 forlorn, dessicated plants, "It was not a very big garden," commented Malheur County Undersheriff Brian Wolfe (who, as it happens, was in Boy Scout Troop 453 with me as a youngster). "A lot of the plants had already died out," Wolfe explained, emphasizing that the operation was a success because the plants that had been seized wouldn't end up "on the streets."


Why was the involvement of a SWAT team "necessary" here? Wolfe insisted that this was necessary for "public safety," since hunters and campers occasionally stumble across marijuana farmers, some of whom "have been found with multiple firearms in the past." 

I'm not confident that "public safety" is enhanced by this use of paramilitary operators. "Officer safety," on the other hand, probably is. During the August 29 operation the SWAT team advanced under cover of pre-dawn darkness. In such situations it's important to exploit every advantage, marijuana plants being notoriously violent when cornered. 

This odd and pointless exercise in rural landscaping became a federally subsidized, multi-state enforcement action when agents of the Bureau of Land Management (yes, those folks are armed as well) arrested a couple of people in Idaho "in connection with" the abandoned marijuana garden.


Malheur County is a huge and beautiful swath of territory in eastern Oregon that runs parallel to western Idaho all the way to the Nevada border. Vale, the tiny town that serves as the county seat, is located along the Oregon Trail and attracts many tourists eager to yank trout from nearby Bully Creek Reservoir or snag a few pheasants. Neighboring Nyssa proudly calls itself the "Thunderegg Capital of the World," a reference to the volcanic geode that serves as Oregon's state rock. Another product of the region's turbulent geologic past is the Malheur Butte, an extinct volcano that presides over the western section of the county like a brooding ursine sentinel.

When Daryl Gates created the first SWAT team in 1968, its advertised purpose was to deal with hostage situations, bank robberies, insurrectionary urban crime, and other high-risk incidents.

Enigmatic landmark: Oregon's Malheur Butte.

Malheur County, Oregon (pop. circa 31,000) is possibly the last place in the country where a SWAT team is needed -- apart from the role it plays in federally subsidized counter-narcotics operations. 

The same is true of Payette County, Idaho, which is located on the eastern side of the Snake River and forms part of the bi-state Treasure Valley. Yet federal seed money is being spent to build SWAT teams in both of these thinly populated rural counties as part of the "war on terror."


The Department of Homeland Security, working through Idaho State University and a quasi-private entity called the Government Training Institute (GTI), recently completed the first national training course intended to develop "type III" SWAT teams. The 16-day training program, which the Idaho Statesman reports was "conducted inside an old airplane hangar in Eagle near Old Horseshoe Bend Road," drew SWAT trainees from across the country to be trained in military tactics by Special Forces operators.  


"The next time a terrorist act happens, it's not going to be [a matter of] flying airplanes into a building, it's going to be something locally," insists Detective Pat Weber from the Payette County Sheriff's Office. Weber is "looking forward to getting the rest of his team trained and categorized," continues the Statesman. "That way Payette can join Malheur County's SWAT team or any other" the unlikely event that the Islamo-Fascists turn their attention to the strategically crucial Treasure Valley. The joint exercise at Centennial Park appeared to be a prelude to inter-agency cooperation of that kind.


According to the Statesman, "the course is something every SWAT team member [in the country] will eventually graduate from -- that is if they want to keep their federal funding." In fact, the training is paid for through Homeland Security grants to local police departments. So the Feds are subsidizing the same training they require SWAT teams to have in order to qualify for even more federal subsidies.

The Homeland Security Department's decision to use Boise as a training site for national SWAT training makes an interesting counterpoint to the Idaho state government's high-profile and low-content posturing about "states' rights." But let it not be forgotten that this is a national program intended to bring all SWAT teams firmly under federal control. As the GTI's Type III Swat Operator's School Course Description points out, "The preparedness of state and local SWAT teams in the United States is one of the major initiatives of the Department of Homeland Security."





Of course, the question is, or should be: "Preparedness" for what? The Treasure Valley isn't likely to experience a tsunami of violent crime, or find itself under siege by Muslim sleeper cells. But there is a growing possibility of organized resistance to enforcement of federal "laws" regarding health care, land use, and taxation. In the event such resistance coalesces, Washington would sure find it helpful to have some federally trained paramilitary cadres in place.
 
All of this offers one small but significant illustration of the fact that your "local" police can be described as such only in purely geographical terms. It's also a reminder that the Homeland Security Regime is quietly building an army of occupation in even the smallest and most placid communities.

A quick note

I'm sorry it's been so long between updates. I've once again been waylaid by computer problems -- terminal, in the case of  my dearly departed desktop. 


Thanks so much for helping keep Pro Libertate in business!

Be sure to tune in for Pro Libertate Radio each Saturday night from 8:00-11:00 Mountain Time on the Liberty News Radio Network.












Dum spiro, pugno!

"Kill Them All, For God Will Know His Own"

Scene of the crime: The couch where Aiyana Jones was sleeping when she was killed. 

Kevin Weeks was a career criminal employed as a Mob hitman, but even he possessed sufficient good judgment and self-restraint to avoid risking the life of a seven-year-old girl.

In Brutal, his aptly titled memoir of the years he spent working for Boston Mob boss -- and protected FBI asset -- James "Whitey" Bulger, Weeks describes how he was given an order to assassinate Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr, who relentlessly tormented Bulger in print. Weeks set up a sniper nest near Carr's home. He had the target set up for the kill, but didn't pull the trigger because Carr's daughter, "a little girl, like seven years old or so," was walking hand-in-hand with her father. 

"I couldn't take a chance of the bullet fragmenting and ricocheting or hitting her or just killing her father in front of her," recounts Weeks.

Not ruthless enough for government "work": Mob Hitman Kevin Weeks

This episode, admittedly, is retold from the self-serving perspective of a convicted murderer.  Ironically, Carr himself, in his valuable book The Brothers Bulger, relates a somewhat similar story of a proposed contract hit that was vetoed by former Boston Mob boss Raymond Patriarca. 

Joe Barboza, a hitman employed by Patriarca, pointed out that the hoodlum targeted by the contract lived in a three-story house in Boston. Barboza suggested that he could "break into the basement and pour gasoline all around and torch the place, after which I either get him with the smoke inhalation or I pick him off when he's climbing out the window."

"Barboza had worked out a plan for every contingency," notes Carr. "He would bring three shooters with him, to watch each side of the house. They would cut the telephone lines to the houses, so that the victim couldn't call the fire department. And just in case one of the neighbors called, before setting the house on fire Barboza planned to phone in false alarms across the city to tie up every fire company." 

Patriarca, who had few compunctions about killing when it suited him, wasn't keen on Barboza's plan, in large measure because of the potential harm to non-combatants.

"Patriarca asked Barboza if anyone else lived in [the targeted hoodlum's] house, and Barboza mentioned the victim's mother," continues Carr. 

"You're gonna kill his mother too?" asked Patriarca.

"It ain't my fault she lives there," the hitman snorted by way of reply. 

"Patriarca canceled the contract," Carr tersely summarizes. Barboza, not surprisingly, proved to be too ruthless and deranged for the Mob, and ended up -- like Bulger -- as another of the FBI's protected assets.

It is a monumental pity that the Detroit Special Response Team, or the decision-makers above them in the Detroit PD, didn't have the sense of proportionality displayed by Mob figures like Kevin Weeks and Raymond Patriarca. If they had, the murder suspect they sought -- 34-year-old Chauncey Owens -- could have been taken into custody without the midnight paramilitary raid that resulted in the burning and shooting death of seven-year-old Aiyana Jones. 

Shortly after midnight on May 16, while Aiyana -- a radiant little girl who might have grown up to resemble Zoe Saldana -- was sleeping on the downstairs living room sofa where she would be killed just a few minutes later, the raid team gathered for a "safety briefing." 

As described by police sources to the Detroit Free Press, that briefing dealt entirely with considerations of "officer safety," which -- as any honest observer will admit -- is the highest and most important consideration in any law enforcement operation.

The raid team "was told there was information that the suspect might be armed, possibly with an assault rifle and a handgun," reports the Free Press. "Someone said there also might be dangerous dogs and that the house was believed to be a possible dope den." 

Another intelligence source speculated that the unprepossesing duplex might actually be the location of the missing Iraqi WMDs, which had been stored in a basement vault guarded by a basilisk. 

No, not really. 

But in its anxiety over officer safety, and its eagerness to stage a properly impressive raid for the benefit of the embedded A&E camera crew, the SRT did not take into account "the possibility of any children being present," despite the fact that the front yard was littered with toys -- a clue that even a police officer should be able to recognize -- and warnings to that effect offered by neighbors as the raid unfolded. 

Ground Zero: Notice the toys? The cops didn't.

 

Street officers and homicide detectives were already on the scene when the SRT's armored personnel carrier rolled up in front of the duplex. 

 

The APC was driven by Officer Joseph Weekley, who was also the first through the door after a flash-bang grenade had been thrown through the window. Weekley went barreling into the living room armed with a machine gun and protected by a ballistic shield. 

Meanwhile, Aiyana -- according to at least one eyewitness -- was being severely burned by the incendiary grenade that had been thrown into her bed. 

It's not clear whether Aiyana suffered her fatal gunshot wound before or after Weekley entered the house. In either case, Officer Weekley has been identified as the shooter. He initially claimed that his gun accidentally went off during a "scuffle" with Aiyana's 47-year-old grandmother. 

 

Within a few hours that account was "clarified" by the police, who said that there was incidental "contact" between Weekley and Aiyana's grandmother; the latter denies having contact of any kind with Weekley. Her story hasn't changed. The same can't be said for the official police account.

Geoffrey Fieger, the attorney representing Aiyana's family, claims to have seen a videotape of the raid showing that the shot was fired into the house shortly after the grenade was hurled through the downstairs window. 



Chauncey Owens, who has been charged with the murder of 17-year-old Je'Rean Blake, was arrested in the upstairs flat, a separate domicile from the one in which Aiyana was killed. Prior to the SRT raid, Owens had been seen on the streets near the duplex. There was no reason -- well, none not dictated by the demands of Homeland Security Theater -- to mount a midnight paramilitary operation to take Owens into custody. 

 Why wasn't an effort made to arrest him on the streets -- after staking out the duplex, if necessary? That question, of course, fails to take into account the "reality TV" camera crew. Once that factor is considered, it's a matter of res ipsa loquitir. 

A&E's Detroit SWAT program made Joseph Weekley a television star. The May 16 raid, as some veteran police officers might put it, wasn't Weekley's first rodeo. Nor was this the first time his conduct put children at severe risk. 




Weekley took part in a February 2007 SRT raid on a Detroit residence occupied by several children. A lawsuit filed on behalf of the family claims that the  SRT gunned down two dogs "without any justifiable reason whatsoever," and that during the operation the officers "had their guns pointed at ... [a] child and [an] infant." 


In that 2007 raid Weekley and his comrades were pursuing a suspect in an armed robbery. As was the case last Sunday, the SRT wasn't dealing with a hostage situation or a barricaded shooter, let alone a heavily armed serial killer on a rampage. None of the people terrorized by the raid and detained at gunpoint was charged in connection with the crime. At least in that earlier incident, the SRT -- in what appears to be an example of unwonted restraint -- declined to use a flash-bang grenade. 

Paramilitary units like the Detroit SRT are used to carry out what are described as "high-risk" operations. This description is generally true -- when applied to those targeted by the raids; the risks experienced by the heavily armed raiders in body armor are minuscule. 


On average, between 100-150 such raids take place every day in this supposedly free country, most of them are narcotics enforcement actions against people involved in non-violent, consensual behavior. Typically, the only "risk" confronted by law enforcement personnel in such circumstances is the possibility that if they knock on the door and present their warrant the evidence will disappear down the toilet. Under this order of priorities, the convenience of prosecutors enforcing asinine drug laws is served at the expense of those brutalized and often killed without reason in their own homes. 



The truly sickening thing about the death of Aiyana Jones is that the decision to carry out a SRT raid was almost certainly dictated by the media ambitions of Detroit Police Chief Warren Evans, who -- in the words of Detroit News columnist Charlie LeDuff -- is positioning himself as a "reality TV" star.



"Television executives around the country have been shown what is known in television parlance as the `sizzle reel' of Chief Evans himself, a video compilation of Detroit's top cop trying to take back the streets," writes LeDuff, who saw that footage several weeks ago. "It is part of a pitch for a full-blown television series."



As Detroit's civic and economic implosion accelerates, the city has become an irresistible setting for state-centric media outlets "peddling mayhem," continues LeDuff. "Spike TV featured the Detroit bureau of the Drug Enforcement Administration in 2008. A&E is taping a season of `Parking Wars' here; production on a series about the Fire Department wrapped late last year. Even Animal Planet is in on the deal with `Animal Cops Detroit.'"

Badass FAIL: Wannabe TV star Warren Evans

Chief Evans' "reality" show pitch begins with the uniformed bureaucrat "gripping a semi-automatic rifle, standing in front of crumbling Michigan Central Depot, staring down a camera and declaring that he'll do whatever it takes to take his city back from crime. The camera will tag along with Warren Evans as he goes on house raids, smokes cigars with his underlings and recalls words to live by told to him by his mother." 



LeDuff's disclosures do much to explain why the A&E camera crew went along on the SRT raid that killed Aiyana Jones, and why the Department chose to stage a midnight "Shock and Awe" operation rather than quietly bringing in the suspect.

Aiyana Jones was killed because the Detroit PD wanted to boost Chief Evans's Q Score. 


Nearly two decades ago, millions of Americans were mortified by the assault on Randy Weaver's family in northern Idaho and the federal siege of the Branch Davidians at Mt. Carmel. 


In the first atrocity, FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi proved -- by gunning down a nursing mother who was cradling her infant daughter -- that he wasn't burdened with the scruples that prevented Kevin Weeks from pulling the trigger on Howie Carr. 

The latter episode ended with the FBI (aided by the Delta Force) carrying out -- on a much larger scale -- an arson/murder plan very similar to the one proposed by Mob hitman Joe Barboza, and vetoed by Mob boss Raymond Patriarca. As Barboza proposed, the Feds pumped the Branch Davidian dwelling full of gas and, when the fire erupted, used snipers to pick off anybody attempting to flee the holocaust. They even interdicted fire and emergency crews while the victims burned and suffocated.




Waco and Ruby Ridge were anomalous only in the sense that they were large, well-publicized versions of the daily acts of state terrorism carried out by the Regime, both here and abroad. Pashtun and Tajik families terrorized by Special Forces raids in Afghanistan could profitably compare notes with survivors of SWAT raids in the United States.

Jason Moon, who served with the U.S. Army in Iraq, brought back a video in which a sergeant told his troops that "The difference between an insurgent and an Iraqi civilian is whether they are dead or alive." For the benefit of those who fail to take that sergeant's meaning, Moon explains: "If you kill a civilian he becomes an insurgent because you retroactively make that person a threat." 

Jason Washburn, who served three tours in Iraq, has recounted how troops were encouraged to carry "drop guns" to be deposited near newly-minted "insurgents"; eventually, this instruction was modified to permit "drop shovels," since a solider in the heat of combat must assume that someone armed with a shovel was planting an IED, and the holy imperative of "force protection" dictates that he take no chances.


By his third tour of Iraq, recounts Marine Jason Wayne Lemue, the rules of engagement had achieved a certain compelling clarity: "[W]e were told to just shoot people and the officers would take care of us." 

Terrifying as all of this is, the really bad news is that there is substantial reason to believe that there are fewer restrictions on the use of lethal force by domestic paramilitary police than there are on U.S. military personnel operating overseas. 

This trend will likely grow much worse when the Homeland Security Apparatus is filled with veterans of the Empire's current foreign campaigns. You know, the kind of people who can blithely dismiss the anguish of a father whose children have been gunned down by foreign invaders by saying, "Well, it's their fault for bringing their children to a battle." 




I can't help but see just a hint of that casual sadism in the following detail regarding the death of Aiyana Jones: Charles Jones recalls that after he heard a flash grenade followed by a gunshot, he rushed into the living room, where "police forced him to lie on the ground, with his face in his daughter's blood."

It was a terrible thing, of course. But at least the troops were safe. And, as Joe Barboza might observe, it wasn't the SRT's fault that Aiyana lived there. 


                                                  Of related interest ...

Here is my recent interview with Scott Horton of Antiwar Radio on the killing of Aiyana Jones, and police militarization in general.


                                                                            An Appeal 

I am deeply grateful for the generous help many of you have provided to me over the past several months. At present, your donations -- and the very modest amounts I get from web advertising -- are the only means I have to provide for my family, and maintain this website and my other ventures. If you have the means and the inclination, I would greatly appreciate the help. Thank you so much! 

Be sure to tune in each Saturday night at 8:00 PM Mountain Time (9:00 Central) for Pro Libertate Radio on the Liberty News Radio Network.












Dum spiro, pugno!

The Death of Aiyana Jones: "Showtime Syndrome" Claims a Child (UPDATED)

Death of a princess: Aiyana Jones, victim of the Homeland Security State

In physics, the term "observer effect" describes how examining a phenomenon can change it, because of the influence of the instruments used to make the observation. Something similar happens to human interactions when cameras are present. The irresistible impulse to play to the lens makes human behavior mannered and self-aware. Every statement becomes a performance, every gesture a pose. 

The steady onslaught of police propaganda shows of the "COPS" genre constitute the worst and most dangerous form of "reality" television. 

A couple of years ago I coined the term "COPS Effect" to describe how pseudo-documentary programs glorifying the police abet irresponsible (but highly telegenic) use of paramilitary tactics. The presence of cameras during law enforcement operations often triggers a condition I call "Showtime Syndrome," a frequently lethal tendency toward self-dramatization on the part of police.


Conflict and danger, whether genuine or contrived, make for high-impact television; de-escalation and sober, careful police work do not. Thus embedding camera crews with the police -- only officially vetted personnel from State-aligned media are suitable; Mundanes  with cameras are subject to summary arrest -- creates a perverse incentive for "peace" officers to choose an approach more likely to result in avoidable death, injury, and property destruction.

Aiyana Jones, the 7-year-old girl shot to death early Sunday (May 17) during a SWAT raid on her Detroit home, was almost certainly a victim of the "COPS Effect."

Troops from the Detroit Police Department's Special Reaction Team ("troops" is a more appropriate description than "officers") seeking a murder suspect executed a no-knock warrant on the home where Aiyana was sleeping on the couch.


Despite warnings from neighbors that there were children present in the home -- a fact attested by the toys scattered in the front yard -- the SRT paramilitaries chose a Fallujah-style "dynamic entry," hurling a flash-bang grenade through a closed window and storming through the front door with guns drawn.

The incendiary grenade landed on the couch where Aiyana was sleeping. Her father claims that the child suffered burns as a result. Seconds later, she was dead. 

One of the SRT troopers engaged in what was called a "tussle" with Mertilla Jones, Aiyana's grandmother. In the antiseptic and completely dishonest language favored by the state-aligned media, the officer's gun "went off."


This means, apparently, that the inanimate object simply discharged sua sponte, independent of intentional or negligent action on the part of its owner, a fully credentialed member of the exalted "Only Ones" -- as in "law enforcement and the military are the Only Ones who should be permitted to own and carry firearms."

Firearms in the hands of the hoi polloi, we are told, have a way of spontaneously firing and killing innocent children. Oddly enough, that's what supposedly happened to a beautiful 7-year-old girl named Aiyana Jones. 

The raid took place at about 12:30 a.m. The individual being sought at the multi-family dwelling was a suspect in a murder that took place at about 3:00 p.m. the previous Friday. Police report that they arrested the suspect at the duplex where the raid occurred. However, they pointedly refuse to say whether the shooting death of Aiyana Jones took place in the same unit where the suspect was found.

This was not a hostage situation. The proverbial clock wasn't ticking. Why didn't the police quietly set up a perimeter at the targeted address, and wait until the suspect left the building? Why stage a post-midnight paramilitary raid against a home where children were present?

A paragraph found toward the end of a Detroit Free Press account provides a likely answer:

"Outside the home, the department's special response team was prepared to go in. Film crews with A&E's `The First 48' reality show, which follows police departments nationwide during the crucial 48 hours after a homicide is committed, were taping the team for a documentary. Police spokesman John Roach said the tapes will be reviewed as part of the investigation."

In other words, the decision-making process in this investigation was being distorted by the "COPS Effect." The department insists that this was a high-risk warrant enforcement operation, but it wasn't too dangerous to bring a camera crew along. Had the intent been simply to capture a murder suspect, the police could have sent a team of street officers and homicide detectives, rather than the paramilitary goon squad and their archivists.

Detroit is an economic moonscape in which the police -- through the institutionalized larceny called "asset forfeiture" -- have become the single largest source of property crime. The SRT and the Narcotics Enforcement Division (which is trained by the SRT) average two full-force raids each day, most of them conducted against single- and multi-family dwellings.

A few years ago, the SRT was featured in an A&E "reality" program entitled "SWAT." Viewers learned, among other things, that each member of the 21-officer SRT is given a GI Joe-style "codename" that is "based upon a specific action, or character trait that the officer has. These codenames are used as tactical call signs, similarly to how pilots in the military refer to one another."

 If the member of this little club who shot Aiyana hasn't been assigned a codename, I think "Fumbles" would make the best match for his skill-set.

The SRT, described as "one of the nation's most elite SWAT teams," was also featured on Attack of the Show in a segment heavy on hardware porn and loaded with preening and posturing by overgrown adolescents who get to wear bitchin' black outfits and carry great big guns.

***

***

The SRT's armory, cooed the man-crushing host, is "beyond impressive," and its techniques and tactics are "awesome." Sure, the unit isn't all that useful when it comes to protecting life, liberty, and property, but it certainly looks intimidating, especially on television.

Just another day in the Reich: A child uses the bathroom under the benevolent gaze of a stormtrooper during a paramilitary drug raid. 

 Of course, this is precisely the point: Paramilitary outfits of this kind are designed to advertise the might of the State. That's why the cameras were along to capture the early morning raid that claimed the life of Aiyana Jones, and it's why the SRT -- rather than a less dangerous and less telegenic police unit -- was assigned that task in the first place.




The life of Aiyana Jones -- may she rest in God's peace -- ended violently in an act of homeland security agitprop. She wasn't the first to die that way, and won't be the last. 


                                                                   UPDATE

Attorney Geoffrey Fieger, who is representing the family of Aiyana Jones, claims that "video footage shows police fired into the home at least once after lobbying a flash grenade through the window."

This apparently contradicts the official account in which Jones was killed by a round fired in an accidental discharge during a "tussle" between one of the raiders and Aiyana's 46-year-old grandmother.

Tune in each Saturday night (8:00-11:00 Mountain Time, 9:00-Midnight Central) for Pro Libertate Radio on the Liberty News Radio Network. Be sure to check out the archives and podcasts as well.  

Dum spiro, pugno!