Massacre at V-Tech: Death by Government

This time the State didn't commit the slaughter directly, as it did fourteen years ago in Waco, Texas. Instead, it created a veritable hunting preserve for the armed psychopath who carried out the massacre. Since the victims had been disarmed by the State, the murderer was able to carry out his crime methodically, even going back to his dorm room to re-load – and he ended the attack on his own terms by killing himself.

As is almost always the case when atrocities of this sort occur, the government's role was limited to disarming the victims, penning them for slaughter, and then sending in heavily armed police to draw the chalk outlines and string up the crime scene tape. And since government is the only entity that grows and prospers through failure, we can anticipate that this State-facilitated mass murder will result in new initiatives to disarm potential victims, embolden private sector criminals, and empower the criminals who rule us and the rented thugs who do their bidding.

“The shootings spread panic and confusion on campus," recounted an AP report. "Witnesses [reported] students jumping out the windows of a classroom building to escape the gunfire. SWAT team members with helmets, flak jackets and assault rifles swarmed over the campus. Students and faculty members carried out some of the wounded themselves, without waiting for ambulances to arrive.”

The SWAT team was useless here, of course, because the mission didn't involve kicking in doors in early-morning no-knock raids. Although advertised as hostage rescue specialists, SWAT operators are generally trained to think in terms of “officer safety” first. After all, the important thing is to protect those who bear the State's insignia.

Commenting on the Columbine mass killings in April 1999 (what the hell is it about April, anyway?), James Bovard recalled:

“Many local SWAT teams descended on the high school parking lot and vicinity after the shooting started. But none of the SWAT teams confronted the killers. Police spokesmen said the SWATs were not sent in `for fear that they might set off another gunfight'.... At least there was no danger of a `gunfight' when Eric Harris and Dyland Klebold were executing unarmed students.... The police response also seemed paralyzed by concerns for `officer safety.' Steve Davis, spokesman for the Jefferson County Sheriff's Department, said, `We had no idea who was a victim and who was a suspect. And a dead police officer would not be able to help anyone.'”

Well, at Columbine, as at Virginia Tech, the live police officers weren't any help, either. But then again, they're not expected to protect and serve law-abiding citizens under assault by armed criminals, nor are they legally required to.

Notes Bovard: “A federal appeals court declared in 1982, `There is no constitutional right to be protected by the state against being murdered by criminals or madmen.'”

This principle doesn't apply only to situations involving a maniac armed with guns. During the 2001 Mardi Gras riot in Seattle, 20-year-old Kristopher Kime was beaten to death by a mob of young predators armed with skateboards and brass knuckles as the local paladins of public order stood placidly at the periphery. Although Kime was the only one killed, many others were attacked at random and severely injured.

In fact, Kime was killed after he went to aid a woman who had been assaulted by the marauders: He was murdered, in other words, because he was doing the job the police supposedly were there to do.

“Police, vastly outnumbered, stood along the perimeter of the crowd and watched as the wounded pleaded for help,” recalls the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. “Police commanders ordered officers to stand by, fearing any move would incite the crowd further and....”

OK, stop right there. What do you think comes next? “... risk injury to innocent bystanders”?

Or perhaps, “... result in open gunplay, leading to the deaths of unarmed civilians”?

No, indeed. Here's how that sentence ends:

“... fearing any move would incite the crowd further and endanger the officers.” (Emphasis added.)

Once again, the operational principle was not to “protect and serve” the innocent, but officer safety uber alles.

This is not always the case, of course. There are, I happily and gratefully acknowledge, many genuinely heroic men in law enforcement and rescue units who defy the officer safety dogma to and on behalf of the innocent, despite the fact that the State does not require them to.

He died trying to save a stranger: The heroic Kris Kime (l.) and the memorial plaque in Seattle's Pioneer Square district, where he was murdered (r.).

In fact, that's what happened in the case of Kris Kime, as described in this excerpt from an account compiled by a Seattle law firm:

“Kris Kime was with his friends in the midst of Pioneer Square.... The group of friends became separated. Some of the young women were assaulted. They were in the process of desperately trying to leave when Kris bent over to help a victimized woman who had been knocked to the ground. As he reached out to her, Kris had no idea that [Jerell] Thomas [who murdered Kime] was approaching him from the rear. Massive blows were delivered to the back of Kris’ head and he fell to the ground....

The group of friends and onlookers created a circle around Kris as the mob surged around. A few people tried to kick him.

As he lay dying in the street, the City [police] stood by and did nothing. Friend Louis Dickinson called 911 to get help. The dispatcher explained that the police would not go in to the melee. `He’s hurt bad' Dickinson pleaded. Not giving up, he ran to the perimeter and begged the police directly. In wooden tones they told him that they had heard the dispatch but would not go in. Meanwhile two off duty paramedics came to help and along with a few of the friends were able to drag Kris out of the square. No ambulances or aid vehicles were present, so Kris was placed into the rear of a patrol car and taken to Harborview.”

While the entire police force – commanders, dispatchers, and officers on the street – allowed this murder to unfold before their eyes, it was a couple of off-duty paramedics who risked their lives in a doomed but noble attempt to save the life of the stricken Samaritan.

Perhaps these heroic paramedics were able to see their moral duty clearly because they were off the clock, and thus not working for the State.

The only excuse for putting up with government at all is the assumption that it will protect us from the violence of the lawless: That's the actual import of the much-misused passages in Romans 13 urging Christians to be subject to governments: God has placed the sword into the hands of rulers to defend the innocent against evil-doers.

Where governments do not carry out that function, they have no moral or practical reason to exist.

As we mourn for the innocent dead and wounded, and pray for the consolation of their families, let us also reflect on the unambiguous truth that the State that rules us cannot protect us -- and that only idolatrous fools would permit that State to disarm us.

Please be sure to visit The Right Source for news and commentary from a freedom-centered perspective.

Romney: Official Candidate of the War and Torture Party?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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