The Drug War's Einsatzgruppen

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

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


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



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

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


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

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

Newport News Daily Press photo

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

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

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


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

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

The Gilbert SWAT team, as depicted on its website.

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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


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

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



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

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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Dum spiro, pugno!

Blowback, Provocation, and Perpetual War

No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures, Dr. Johnson informs us. In a somewhat similar vein,  the Regime's post-9/11 "counter-terrorism" stings have avoided the official fiction that Muslim terrorism is inspired by a hatred for our "freedom." The preferred bait to lure marginalized Muslims -- many of whom have little commitment to the faith, no detectable terrorism-related skills, and abundant personal problems -- is outrage over the Regime's imperial foreign policy. 


As Scott Horton of the invaluable Antiwar Radio has pointed out, the scripted patter of federal provocateurs doesn't focus on America's refusal to submit to Sharia, or our decadent popular culture. In seeking to attract potential recruits, the Regime's agents invoke the plight of besieged Muslims in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, the West Bank, and elsewhere -- people whose sufferings are either inflicted or underwritten by Washington.

A key admission of this fact is found in the official press release announcing the arrest of the so-called "Newburgh 4," a group of ex-convicts from New York accused of plotting to bomb a synagogue in the Bronx and attack military aircraft at a nearby Air National Guard base. 

The four accused in the plot -- James Cromitie, Onta Williams, David Williams, and Laguerre Payen -- were approached by veteran federal agent provocateur Shahed Hussein, a career criminal with convictions in both the U.S. and his native Pakistan. Hussein was paid a huge sum by the federal government to act as a terrorism "facilitator" -- a term that was actually used by assistant U.S. Attorney in his opening statement at the ongoing trial of the "Newburgh 4." 

As attorney Steven Downs points out in a study of the "preemptive prosecution" of Muslims by the federal government, when Hussein (who called himself "Maqsood") materialized at the Newburgh mosque in June 2008, "His con was so obvious that the real Muslims there would have nothing to do with him, but he was able to attract Cromitie (and later the other three) with offers of money and friendship." 

Following the Federal script: "Terrorist" James Cromitie in custody.

 
Despite the fact that Cromitie wasn't particularly devout, Hussein was able to radicalize him by dwelling on the human cost of Washington's war on Afghanistan.  

 According to the Feds, Cromitie "explained to the informant that his parents had lived in Afghanistan and that he was upset about the war there and that many Muslim people were being killed in Afghanistan and Pakistan by the United States Military forces. [He] expressed interest in returning to Afghanistan and spoke to [the provocateur] about how if he, Cromitie, were to die a martyr, he would go to `paradise.'"


It's reasonable to suspect that the devotion expressed by Cromitie and his friends had at least something to do with the material blandishments offered by Hussein, such as at least $25,000 apiece (and as much as $250,000 to one of them) if they cooperated in his plot to plant a bomb at a synagogue and fire Stinger missiles at military planes. 

Posing as a wealthy terrorist recruiter, Hussein cut an impressive figure: He drove a BMW and other federally provided luxury vehicles, and his targets were understandably eager to catch some of the money he was willing to throw around. They had no money, no jobs, no cars, and no training. One was a drug addict, another being treated for mental illness. Cromitie, who had been sent to prison for drug dealing, was working a series of low-paying odd jobs.

The devoted Muslims attending the mosque wisely shunned Hussein's company after he described himself as a representative of a Pakistani terrorist group called Jaish-e-Mohammed. The four guys he managed to snag as patsies appeared to know next to nothing about the Muslim religion. 

In fact, it was the petty crook the Regime hired to be a provocateur who had to teach Cromitie how to lead the members of his "jihadist cell" in prayer. 


"Should I do that real quick?" asked "cell leader" Cromitie in a recorded exchange with Hussein.


"Lead it loud, so everybody can understand," replied Hussein, who was actually directing a performance rather than gathering evidence of a criminal conspiracy. 


In similar fashion, Hussein "often seemed eager in the recordings to remind the men of their extremist sponsors while discouraging the idea that money should motivate them," observes a New York Times report of the trial.  During meetings in the house rented by the FBI to serve as a mise-en-scene for the federally scripted production, Hussein repeatedly invoked Jaish-e-Mohammed, an organization completely unknown to  the "conspirators" before the provocateur brought it up. 


"It's not about money," insisted the Pakistani crook to the people he had targeted. "It's about Jaish-e-Mohammed." Actually, for Cromitie and the others, it was "about the money. They had no interest in, or inclination toward, terrorism until they had been seduced by promises of easy money to be earned in "paying back" those they considered responsible for attacking Muslims abroad. 

As Hussein's FBI handler Robert Fuller noted, by way of reassuring security personnel at Stewart Air Force Base, Cromitie "would never try anything without the informant with him." Nonetheless, Hussein did everything he could to push a balking and puzzled Cromitie into an out-front role as the "leader" of the supposed plot.


"I'm not running the show, he's running the show," Hussein repeatedly told the others with respect to Cromitie's purported leadership.


"Ain't nobody running the show," an annoyed Cromitie exclaimed at one point in a recorded conversation. "Why do you keep saying that?"

Cromitie's sense of unease grew to such an extent that he actually wanted to bail out of the plot when he detected a federal "tail" while en route to pick up the (disabled) Stinger missiles. He was aware that he and his colleagues were being watched. However, for some reason Cromitie didn't connect that fact to the way he had been cast as the "leader" by the big-talking stranger who pushed him to the front of the supposed plot. 

Despite the efforts to "brand" this supposed plot as a Jaish-e-Mohammed operation, the Feds now admit that none of the people involved had ties to actual terrorists. As the trial began, Assistant U.S. Attorney David Raskin conceded that the case is "not going to be about al-Qaeda, and it's not going to be about foreign terrorist organizations." 

What this means, of course, is that the Feds are, once again, prosecuting people for allegedly taking part in a "plot" created by the Feds -- a plot they were invited to join by a Federal asset who urged people to be angry over atrocities being committed overseas by the same Federal Government.

The "Ft. Dix Five."

The "Newburgh 4" plot is so obviously an FBI production that U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon, who is presiding over the trial, admits to referring to it as "the un-terrorist case." It is hardly unique: This little melodrama was created from the same template used to create the "Fort Dix 5," the "Miami 6," the "Liberty City Seven," the  so-called Michigan "Ummah" conspiracy, and other groups. 

In each of those cases, the Feds dipped into their vast pool of criminally compromised informant-provocateurs, rented a meeting place, supplied the funding and hardware, and gathered a handful of pathetic flunkies into a telegenic terrorist "threat." Most importantly, the Feds, by way of their hired provocateurs, selected a grievance they knew would radicalize their recruits -- a jihad to avenge the deaths of innocent Muslims abroad, not to punish infidels at home for their refusal to submit to Islamic rule. 


In ritualized remembrances of Black Tuesday, no mention is made of what happened on that date eleven years before "The Day the World Changed." On that date the first President George Bush, invoking the supposed authority of the UN Security Council, outlined his vision of a "new world order" in an address before a joint session of Congress.

The path to global hegemony, as described by Bush pere, would run through the Middle East, and following it would mean slaughtering tens or hundreds of thousands of Muslims -- through invasions, embargoes, and intermittent bombing campaigns. It also meant absorbing huge populations of Muslim refugees from Somalia, Iraq, and other countries blessed by Washington's peculiar armed humanitarianism. 

Interview with a Patsy: Brother Corey of the "Seas of David."

 One predictable result, as noted in a report on "homegrown terrorism" compiled for the Bipartisan Policy Center by veteran Establishment drones Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton, is "the increasingly prominent role in planning and operations that U.S. citizens and residents have played" in jihad-related activities. 

This doesn't refer only to the FBI's prefabricated terrorist "plots," but also to involvement by American Muslims in foreign armed insurgencies against the U.S. military and Washington's proxies. 


"The conventional wisdom has long been that America was immune to the heady currents of radicalization affecting both immigrant and indigenous Muslim communities elsewhere in the West," observes the report. "That has now been shattered by the succession of cases that have recently come to light of terrorist radicalization and recruitment occurring in the United States.... As the ranks of U.S. recruits have grown, the new frontlines have become the streets of Bridgeport, Denver, Minneapolis, and other big and small communities across America."

Referring to the abortive Times Square car bombing, Hamilton and Kean insist that it "was not a `one-off' event perpetrated by a `lone wolf' but rather is part of an emerging pattern of terrorism that directly threatens the United States and presents new challenges to our national security." 


During a June 2010 court appearance in New York City, Faisal Shahzad, the accused would-be Times Square bomber, described himself as a "Muslim soldier" driven to violence as an "answer to the U.S. terrorizing Muslim nations and the Muslim people," continues the report. "He further promised that if Washington did not cease invading Muslim lands and did not withdraw from Iraq, Afghanistan, and other Muslim countries, more attacks on the United States would follow. Americans, Shahzad explained, `don't see the drones killing children in Afghanistan.... [They] only care about their people, but they don't care about the people elsewhere in the world when they die.' In his view, this means that attacks on children and innocents are both justified and should be expected."



"While it is perhaps tempting to dismiss Shahzad's threats as the irrelevant ranting of an incompetent wannabe terrorist, he and his likely successors present the most serious challenge to the security of the U.S. and the safety of its citizens since the September 11, 2001 attacks," conclude Hamilton and Kean. 


We shouldn't be surprised that Hamilton and Kean studiously avoid the obvious: The people running the Regime's security organs agree with Shahzad's analysis completely. They know that it is Washington's foreign policy, not the Koran, that inspires contemporary Muslim terrorism. Those people understand how to create and exploit enemies.  


The all-but-unspeakable truth we should ponder on today's grim anniversary is that the Regime is willing to permit those enemies to slaughter Americans by the thousands in the service of its interests.



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Dum spiro, pugno!

Federal Provocateurs: The "One Percent Solution" (Updated, Corrected, February 3)

Draped across the throat of our nation like a lank noose about to be pulled taut is a system of 102 Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs). These entities, which could properly be called homeland security soviets, combine state and local police with FBI Special Agents, covert operatives from the CIA, personnel from various directorates of the Department of Homeland Security, and investigators from the IRS.

The FBI, which is the lead agency for domestic counter-terrorism and spends about two-thirds of its advertised $4 billion budget on terrorism-related matters, has assigned 2,000 agents to the various JTTFs. Digging a bit deeper into the FBI's budget, Professor Alexandra Natapoff of Loyola Law School (Los Angeles) discovered that the Bureau maintains an army of at least 15,000 “confidential informants”; the Drug Enforcement Administration admits to having 4,000 snitches on its payroll. But the number of informants working directly for the Feds is probably only a tiny fraction of the entire stukachi* population, given the uncounted masses of snitches working for state and local police agencies.

Weird? Sure. A terrorist? Well ... no: Clinton Udet Picknert was arrested by a Joint Terrorism Task Force late last year for shining a pocket laser at airplanes as they approached an airport in El Paso. That's cost-effective law enforcement!

I'm beginning to suspect that the second most important purpose of the “war on drugs,” the first being the creation of a self-replenishing revenue stream for the Regime, is the generation of a similarly self-replenishing pool of potential informants. Drug offenders, both petty and prodigious, make terrific snitches, and even better provocateurs.

The vast and growing snitching subculture, notes Profess Natapoff, is one in which “secret negotiations lead to the application of secret rules in which crimes are forgiven, or resurrected, by state actors without defense counsel, judicial review, or public scrutiny.” Many black communities “are being infused with snitches and ... informing has become a way of life. Active informants impose their criminality on their community, while at the same time compromising the privacy and peace of mind of families, friends, and neighbors.”

Most snitches are free to commit certain “authorized” crimes, and many quite predictably commit various “unauthorized” crimes, as well. The system is constructed so as to attract not only common criminals, but also a certain breed of nihilist. Natapoff explains that in the snitching system, “the individual willing to sacrifice friends, family, and associates fares better than the loyalist.”

This is entirely predictable, since snitches work for the State, an idol that will countenance no contending loyalties.

In previous installments, we've examined how the Regime frequently deploys “Cooperating Sources” as provocateurs to manufacture supposed terrorist threats. In a lengthy and exceptionally well-researched investigative piece, the current issue of Rolling Stone (of all things) describes, in detail, how the 102 FBI-directed JTTFs act as a federal “Fear Factory” by “using paid informants to cajole and inveigle targets ... into pursuing their harebrained schemes.”

A potent illustration is provided by the career of William Chrisman, aka “Jameel,” a “Cooperating Source” who helped entrap a pathetic, homeless schlep from Rockford, Illinois named Derek Shareef. In November 2006 Mr. Shareef was a socially maladjusted 22-year-old American Muslim working as a clerk in a video game store. He didn't have a car or a permanent address, let alone military training or the means to acquire weaponry or explosives.

One day, “Jameel” showed up at Shareef's video store and struck up a conversation. Shortly thereafter Shareef moved in with his new “friend” and his three wives, who nurtured whatever radical impulses dwelt inside the young man's heart. At every opportunity, “Jameel” encouraged Shareef to indulge in jihadist fantasies, some of which displayed (as Rolling Stone correspondent Guy Lawson points out) “an ambivalence unusual in a suicide bomber hellbent on murdering civilians.” For instance: When “Jameel” asked about a “time frame” for an attack on a local government building, Shareef suggested the Christmas holidays, when potential victims would be scarce. “Hell, we ain't gotta hit nobody – just blow the place up,” Shareef pointed out.

But this wasn't sufficient for “Jameel”'s designs. He continued to cultivate radicalism in his hapless target, marinating him in talk of violent jihad and hatred for America and the Jews. At last the two of them settled on a plot to set off hand grenades at a local shopping mall. Shareef was arrested “without incident” in a parking lot where he expected to trade stereo speakers for a handgun and four hand grenades.

In the federal indictment, the hand grenades Shareef was manipulated into seeking were referred to – without irony – as “weapons of mass destruction.” Last November he pleaded guilty to that charge, and faces the prospect of 30 years to life in prison. The headline of a typical story about this episode claims that an “FBI sting thwart[ed]” Shareef's plans. In fact, there was no mall bombing plot until Shareef fell under the influence of FBI “Cooperating Source” William Chrisman.

The FBI, perhaps embarrassed by the thinness of its case against Shareef, insists that he was part of a much vaster plot involving his Muslim friend, a Navy veteran named Hassan Abu-Jihaad. The two of them supposedly had detailed intelligence on US naval activities in the Persian Gulf, and allegedly plotted to attack US military facilities in Arizona and San Diego.

Abu-Jihaad, who has been indicted on terrorism-related charges, admits discussing the concept of “defensive Jihad” with Shareef – that is, the idea that Muslims would be allowed to stage attacks on military facilities in the event that they were rounded up and detained therein. It's likely that similar conversations have taken place among some politically disenchanted Americans who are not Muslims. I certainly hope so, in any case.

But as Abu-Jihaad told the FBI's “Cooperating Source” in his case, “I ain't no jihadi.” That informant, whom Abu-Jihadd dismissed as an “idiot” and a liar, was the same “Jameel” who set up Shareef – William Chrisman.

An AP profile of Chrisman paints him as a public-spirited Muslim patriot who “walked into an FBI office and offered his services” after 9-11, and who “has since helped out on several cases.” Oh, sure, there is the small matter of his past as a crack dealer, and (more importantly) his prison term for armed robbery and auto theft. Chrisman, who converted to Islam in prison, has three wives and nine children to support, and a prison record that makes it difficult to find adequate employment. I suspect this is a recipe for just the kind of desperation the FBI finds useful in an informant/provocateur.

This guy didn't agree to become a "Cooperating Source" -- that is, a snitch/provocateur. Look what it got him.

Here's something else to consider. Chrisman's profile – except for the multiple marriages and large brood of children – is similar to that of another prison convert to Islam, Jose Padilla. It's a matter of record that the FBI was seeking to recruit Padilla as an informant and, most likely, provocateur. Padilla refused, and as a result was designated an “enemy combatant,” confined without trial or formal charges for more than three years, tortured, and railroaded into a 17-year prison term after a trial worthy of Moscow circa 1939.

I cannot prove, but I have no doubt, that those recruited as counter-terrorism “Confidential Sources” for the FBI are presented with two stark possibilities. They can do whatever the Feds command – betray friends, incite terrorist plots, set up helpless people – and be paid handsomely, as Chrisman was. Or they can reject that option and receive the Padilla Treatment. And those who choose the first option are probably given frequent reminders that the Feds can subject them to Option Two at any time of their choosing.

Fishing for informants: The front of a tri-fold pamphlet produced in the late 1990s by a Joint Terrorism Task Force in Phoenix. The inside, which lists potential threats (a category that includes various "right-wingers," but not Islamic radicals), is found below. (Click to enlarge.)


In case after case, the Feds have winnowed a handful of eccentrics from Muslim communities and used a provocateur to create a “terrorist conspiracy.” But they're not focusing exclusively on Muslims.

Take the case of Hal Turner, a splenetic neo-Nazi blatherskite who – because of the needs of the ADL, SPLC, and other self-anointed watchdog groups – was able to punch well above his weight as an Internet broadcaster. Turner ceaselessly extolled the putative virtues of “patriotic assassination,” urged the murder of interracial couples and Jews, and generally did his best to foment violence and mayhem.

“If I had to assess my role in the world,” Turner once wrote on his website, “I think I would be ... an inspiration to a whole slew of Timothy McVeighs! I don't make bombs, I make bombers.” Turner insisted that his legions of devoted followers would wreak an awful vengeance on the Feds if they were to “take [him] out.”

As it happens, the Feds apparently did take Turner out, after a fashion: He effectively disappeared a few weeks ago, just after it was revealed that ...

... wait for it ...

... wait for it ...

Turner was actually an informant for a Joint Terrorism Task Force in New Jersey. His handler was an FBI Special Agent named Stephen M. Haug.

Hackers exhumed an e-mail exchange between Turner and Haug (sounds a bit like the title of a canine-enhanced “buddy movie,” doesn't it?) in which the former reported that a death threat against Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold had been posted on Turner's website. Significantly, Feingold had been identified by Turner as one of 46 senators “who I believed should be removed from office” -- by way of assassination.

The face of a stukach: FBI neo-Nazi informant/provocateur Hal Turner.

“Once again, my fierce rhetoric has helped flush out a possible crazy,” Turner boasted with the puerile pride of a toddler who just went potty all by himself.

More to the point: Once again we see an FBI provocateur behind a purported political murder plot.

All of this savors strongly of COINTELPRO, the FBI's decades-long program of infiltration, surveillance, and provocation intended to disrupt anti-Establishment movements and organizations.

Among those targeted by COINTELPRO, James Ridgeway and Jean Casella recall, were “civil rights, anti-war, student, and women’s liberation groups, as well as the John Birch Society and the Ku Klux Klan.”

“During this period, the bureau tapped phones, opened mail, planted bugs, and burglarized homes and offices,” continue Ridgeway and Casella. “At least 26,000 individuals were at one point catalogued on an FBI list of persons to be rounded up in the event of a `national emergency.' In the end, the Bureau conducted more than half a million investigations of so-called subversives and maintained files on well over a million Americans-all of this without a single conviction for a criminal act.”

The Bureau supposedly got out of this Stalinist business in the early 1970s. Assuming, for the moment, that they actually did, they've more than made up for lost time since the current “counter-terrorism” campaign began in 1995, following the Oklahoma City Bombing – the consummation of a plot, let's not forget, that gestated in Elohim City, a neo-Nazi commune overrun with “Cooperating Sources” in the employ of three-letter agencies.

FBI Special Agent Lundgren told Rolling Stone that the JTTFs are governed by “the Dick Cheney one percent solution”: If there is just a one percent chance that a terrorist incident can occur, “then we have to treat our response as if there were a 100 percent chance.”

Of course, where no evidence of a plot exists, the Feds stack the odds by employing provocateurs who supply the missing “one percent chance.”

UPDATE

In the comments thread below, Pat Hiver ** refers us to the terrific "Winter Patriot" blog, has more information about, and a photograph of, the detestable provocateur and "entrapment specialist" William Chrisman.

The above-mentioned Hal Turner has also weighed in with what appears to be a form letter of sorts defending what passes for his honor. While I certainly want Mr. Turner to have his say, he should be advised that the rules of decorum here don't generally permit unexpurgated vulgarity of the sort found in his missive.

I was informed today that arrangements are being made to sell Liberty in Eclipse through Amazon.com. However... It is available right now through The Right Source.

__

*“Stukach” is a Russian epithet used to describe a secret police informant.

** In the first version of the update, Mr. Hiver was mistakenly referred to as the author/publisher of the Winter Patriot blog.

Dum spiro, pugno!

Federally-Funded Niche-Market Nazis

Your Federal Government at work: David Gletty, washed-up Roller Derby performer-turned-agent provocateur, addresses a meeting of the National Socialist Movement.

“Remember: Image is important,” David Gletty, leader of the Orlando chapter of the National Socialist Movement, admonished his tiny knot of demonstrators during its February 2006 rally. “We want to stay civilized. Give these police officers the respect they deserve.”

Gletty's professionalism, if not his perceived commitment to an abhorrent cause, impressed James Carlson of the Orlando Weekly, who had embedded himself in the NSM protest.

“Gletty knows what he's doing,” wrote Carlson, who described how the NSM leader shepherded the neo-Nazis through the much larger counter-protest, while keeping their spirits up with regular doses of “anti-Semitic bile.”

What he really wants is to direct: Gletty (center, back to camera) works with the road company of "Springtime for Hitler."

As it happens, Gletty did indeed “know what he was doing.” He once made his living in Roller Derby, a pseudo-sport that is close kindred to professional “wrestling”; this meant that he was possessed both athleticism and theatricality. He knew how to generate “heat” from an audience by performing a convincing “heel turn.” So it was entirely natural for the FBI to recruit him as an informant/provocateur in the NSM.

Appropriately, that fact came out in the course of a trial involving yet another federally funded farce, the "war on drugs."

Gletty's profession didn't change that much; he just switched employers and put the taxpayers on the hook for his livelihood. It's worthwhile to ask how many others in the neo-Nazi movement are drawing federal paychecks. The Minnesota-based NSM itself seems inert, more devoted to a bizarre niche marketing strategy (peddling such things as Ayran-friendly death metal and Nazi-themed “hoodies,” among other things; no, I'm not kidding) than any serious effort to propagate a mass movement devoted to resurrecting the Reich.

Neo-Nazi nebbish Bill White signs a copy of Mein Kampf

For at least four decades, people involved in “direct action” groups – whether of the “left” or the “right” -- have shared a piece of valuable folk wisdom: If someone joins your group and wants to start blowing things up, mark him down as a federal informant. During the heyday of the FBI's COINTELPRO operation, more than a few radical groups (including various Klan factions) owed their very existence to the Feds, whose informants fleshed out chapter rolls of organizations that otherwise would have died through attrition.

The Oklahoma City Bombing represented the zenith – or nadir, depending on how one looks at it – of the FedGov's role as a mole-master for informants and provocateurs. Elohim City, the rural Oklahoma white supremacist commune that served as the womb of the bombing plot, was overrun with informants; its residents could hardly throw a stiff-armed salute without nailing a provocateur in the face. And while on the subject of provocateurs, there's provocative evidence that Timothy McVeigh, rather than being a lethally disgruntled ex-federal employee, may have been a Federal asset at the time of the bombing.

Oddly enough, one of the informants at Elohim City – one-time white supremacist pin-up Carol Howe -- actually collected valuable pre-bombing intelligence that could have been used to prevent the atrocity. The Feds reacted in predictable fashion: They ignored or suppressed Howe's reports, blew her cover, and sent her back into Elohim City, apparently in the hope that she'd be disposed of.

Somehow, I fail to be terrified.

Obiter dicta

Forgive me for writing short today. Sick kids, a chronically ill (but improving -- thanks for the prayers) wife, and overlapping deadlines have combined to rob me of blogging time.

Please visit the updated and revised page for The Right Source. Today I'll be doing the regular Friday gig co-hosting Kevin Shannon's radio program.

The debut of Pro Libertate: The e-zine is nigh on arrival. I've seen the beta version and it looks great; many thanks to Eric Bearly for his terrific work on that project, as well as TRS's new website. Hopefully the debut issue will be on-line soon.

Beginning Monday, I'll be doing a regular daily radio commentary for KBGN radio in Caldwell, Idaho. I'll provide the relevant details as they become available. Bandwidth permitting, we may find room for the commentaries as podcasts on TRS's website -- but don't hold me to that.

Tom Eddlem, a former colleague of mine at The New American and the JBS, is now a colleague at The Right Source and Pro Libertate. In his blog at Dangerous Talk, Tom explains some of the reasons why he has severed his connections with The New American.

The nub of the matter:

"I’ve separated from The New American because I have limited time, and can’t afford to waste any more of my nearly non-existent free time (I have three daughters who are very active) on an organization that is not devoted to the fight for freedom. "

As the freedom-obsessed father of five, I empathize with Tom and share his priorities.