Santorum: State Murder as a "Moral Enterprise"

“God did not just give us rights,” pontificated His High Holiness Rick Santorum during a January 17 campaign stop in Lexington, South Carolina. “He gave us a moral code by which to exercise them. See, that’s what Ron Paul sort of leaves out. He leaves out [that the] rights and responsibilities that we have come from God…. And he says, `No, we just have rights, and then that’s it.’ No, we don’t. America is a moral enterprise.” And morality, Santorum believes, is best instilled through State coercion, including officially sanctioned murder.

Santorum presented that assessment just a few hours after a GOP debate in which Dr. Paul precipitated torrential booing from the pious Republican crowd by insisting that government is bound by the central tenet of the Christian moral code – the Golden Rule. 

According to Newt Gingrich – whose General Urko act drove the assembled Republicans into a simian frenzy of bloodlust – it is “irrational” of Paul to insist that there are limits on the government’s powers of discretionary killing. 

Elaborating on that idea in a January 18 interview with South Carolina pastor Kevin Boling, Gingrich asserted that Dr. Paul’s insistence on applying the Golden Rule to foreign policy demonstrated that he had absorbed the “anti-American, self-hating attitude of the American Left.” 

That accusation of moral lassitude against Dr. Paul – who served in the military as a young father with two small children – dribbled down the multiple chins of an impenitent Chickenhawk who used his wife as a draft deferment, then spent the last few years of the Vietnam Era schtupping college girls. ("We would have won in 1974 if we could have kept him out of the office, screwing [a young volunteer] on the desk,” lamented his congressional campaign director.) 

 In the same interview, Newt -- who is the Hogarthian embodiment of several of the deadly sins – reiterated the indolent smear that most of Paul’s core supporters are young people obsessed with recreational drug use (something in which Newt indulged before emerging as the self-appointed “Teacher of Civilization”). Perhaps inspired by Santorum’s example, Newt used that caricature as the basis for his own little collectivist homily.

“We have been endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, but that means we have to be citizens,” Newt decreed, claiming that “a heroin addict or a methamphetamine addict [has] lost the ability to be a true citizen.”

There is nothing in the Declaration of Independence that describes rights as contingent on citizenship. According to that document, individual rights are innate and unalienable; government, on the other hand, enjoys a contingent existence, and can be altered or abolished whenever it imperils those rights. In that scheme, the purpose of citizenship is to restrain the government, rather than to submit to its supposedly ennobling influence.

Like most of the people who support him, Dr. Paul has no interest in drug consumption, recreational or otherwise. He simply understands that the federal government has no constitutional authority to wage war on drug consumption, and that no government anywhere has the moral authority to regulate what individuals choose to ingest. He likewise understands that prohibition always engenders lethal violence – something vividly illustrated by the horrendous death toll exacted by Washington’s proxy drug war in Mexico, which has claimed more than 40,000 lives since 2006.

Once again, Dr. Paul’s perspective on this question is informed by the New Testament: “Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man…. Do not ye yet understand, that whatsoever entereth in at the mouth goeth into the belly, and is cast out into the draught? But those things which proceedeth out of the mouth come forth from the heart; and they defile the man. For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, thefts, false witness, blasphemies....” (Matthew 15:10-12, 16-19) 

While Jesus of Nazareth never uttered a syllable endorsing drug prohibition, He had a great deal to say denouncing war and related violence. To judge from the priorities and behavior of the “Christian” Right, one would assume that exactly the opposite were the case. 

Although Rick Santorum’s politics are detestable, he is a robustly decent husband and father. That certainly isn't true of the human pustule called Newt Gingrich. Although sharply different in terms of their personal deportment, Santorum and Gingrich share a totalitarian worldview: They assume that while nobody is virtuous enough to govern himself, they belong to a consecrated caste that is holy enough to rule over others. 

Reaching for a big historical idea and falling badly short, Santorum attempted to depict Dr. Paul as a Jacobin:

“I would argue that [Dr. Paul’s] understanding of the Constitution was similar to the French Revolution…. Their founding watchwords were the words, `liberty’ and `fraternity.’ Fraternity. Brotherhood. But no fatherhood. No God. It was a completely secular revolution. An anti-clerical revolution. And the root of it was, whoever’s in power rules.”

Bear in mind, once again, that Santorum offered that description of the candidate who – just hours earlier – had been publicly ridiculed for insisting that God’s law, the Golden Rule, applies to everybody, including those who preside over the criminal enterprise called the State. Furthermore, among the current GOP presidential contenders, Dr. Paul is the only candidate to extol the Constitution as a law that restrains the government. Santorum, on the other hand, consistently seeks to restrain the individual and emancipate the State. While he insinuates that Ron Paul is an anarchist (he isn’t -- none save One was perfect, after all -- but he should be), Santorum has giddily celebrated State lawlessness. 

During an October visit to South Carolina, Santorum endorsed assassination as an instrument of policy when employed by the U.S. government.

“On occasion, scientists working on the nuclear program in Iran turn up dead," he explained, broadly intimating that the U.S. government was responsible. "I think that's a wonderful thing, candidly….I think we should send a very clear message that if you are scientist from Russia or North Korea or from Iran, and you are going to work on a nuclear program to develop a nuclear bomb for Iran, you are not safe."

Santorum, who is regarded by some misguided conservatives as a champion of the pro-life cause, warned those who doubt that the U.S. government would assassinate civilian scientists should take heed to the way it treats American citizens designated enemies of the State: "When people say, `You can't go out and assassinate people' — well, tell that to al-Awlaki…. We've done it. We've done it to an American citizen."

Actually, the Obama administration not only assassinated U.S.-born Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaki — who was never charged with a crime of any kind, let alone convicted and sentenced by a court -- but also al-Awlaki's 16-year-old son, Adbdulrahman al-Awlaki, who was killed by a drone strike in Yemen while he was having dinner with a cousin (who also perished).


The Obama administration circulated the story that the 16-year-old was actually an adult “suspected” of being a “militant,” thereby redefining the killing as a strategic success. But the family was able to document that the youngster — who had gone to Yemen in a frantic search for his father, known to be on a U.S. assassination list — was born in Colorado in 1995.


Behavior of this kind is generally associated with the likes of Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong-Il. Proponents of an aggressive foreign policy often characterize the regimes ruling countries such as Iran, Syria, and North Korea as despotisms that routinely "murder their own citizens," and thus pose a threat to the peace of the world. Yet Rick Santorum — who yields to nobody in his zeal to wage war against distant and relatively powerless regimes — openly celebrates the summary execution of U.S. citizens, and describes it as a model for similar "wet work" operations against citizens of other countries. 


For Santorum, the defining principle of politics is power, not liberty. His chief ideological inspiration is not the imperfectly realized individualist James Madison, or even the centralizing constitutionalist James Madison, but the arch-authoritarian Joseph de Maistre, the 18^th Century apostle of absolutism. His role model in policy terms could well be the murderous “Operative” from the film “Serenity.”


Maistre taught that “all greatness, all power, all social order depends on the Executioner; he is the terror of human society and tie that holds it together. Take away this incontrovertible force from the world, and at that very moment order is superseded by chaos, thrones fall, society disappears." 


Santorum visibly shares the fear that society will disintegrate if the State is deprived of the discretionary power to kill people. In the film “Serenity,” the Operative acted as Maistre’s Executioner on behalf of a galaxy-spanning bureaucratic empire called the Alliance. He spent most of the film pursuing River Tam, a brilliant and irrepressibly individualistic young girl with psychic abilities who had been abducted by the regime and programmed to be an assassin.


River’s brother, a gifted physician named Simon, sacrificed his future to free River, and the two of them wound up aboard the Serenity, a merchant ship commanded by a noble but embittered man named Malcolm Reynolds. Years earlier, Malcolm (or Mal) had fought with the “Browncoats,” a group of separatists who waged a valiant but losing battle for impendence from the Alliance. 


In his pursuit of River and Simon, Alliance forces commanded by the Operative lays waste to an outpost called Haven, where Mal and his crew had briefly found refuge. Similar Alliance attacks have destroyed every other colony where Mal might have taken cover.
“I’m sorry,” the Operative explains to Mal following the massacres. “If your quarry goes to ground, leave no ground to go to…. [D]id you think none of this was your fault?”


“I don’t murder children,” Mal replies with frigid disgust.


“I do,” the Operative unblinkingly replies. “If I have to.” 


“Why?” Mal demands. “Do you even know why they sent you?”


“It’s not my place to ask,” the Operative wearily explains. “I believe in something greater than myself. A better world. A world without sin.” 


Although he possesses none of the Operative’s fearsome martial prowess, Rick Santorum likewise believes it is possible to build a better world through State murder – not just Iraqi, Afghan, Pakistani, and (soon) Iranian children, but American children like Abdulrahman al-Awlaki. 


It’s little wonder that Santorum – like Newt Gingrich and the death cult adherents who compose much of the GOP’s rank and file -- finds Ron Paul’s devotion to the Golden Rule to be morally unsatisfactory. 

Thanks, once again...

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No Law? No Warrant? No Problem!

"Do you expect to see any violence here today?"

"I certainly hope so." --

Narcotics officer Sgt. Stedenko, aka "Hardhat," answers a reporter's question at a drug checkpoint on the U.S.- Mexican border, from the film Up In Smoke.


Sal Agro, a 67-year-old man from Lake Orion, Michigan, died of a heart attack on September 2. Although those responsible for Agro's untimely death will never admit as much, he was the victim of an act of state terrorism carried out a week earlier by the Oakland County Sheriff's Office

Agro, along with his son, helped operate a treatment center in nearby Ferndale called Clinical Relief that provided medical marijuana to physician-approved clients under a 2008 Michigan state law. Sal, who had recently undergone hip surgery, was authorized to grow and use marijuana himself. His wife was authorized both to use marijuana and provide it to others as a caregiver. They had invited local officials to inspect the Clinical Relief facility.

He obeyed the rules, and they killed him anyway: Sal Agro, RIP.

Last June, with at least eight applications pending to open facilities like Clinical Relief, the Ferndale City Council imposed a temporary moratorium on dispensing medical marijuana while it explored new ways to harass the facilities through zoning restrictions. This prompted an objection from Mayor Craig Covey, who pointed out that the medical marijuana clinics would already be covered by existing ordinances. Nor were they likely to be profitable, given the detailed and often self-contradictory regulations inflicted on them under the Michigan Medical Marijuana Act (MMMA), which voters approved by referendum in 2008.

On August 25, the Ferndale City Council lifted the moratorium. On the very next day, the local counter-narcotics Gestapo staged a paramilitary raid against several locations in Oakland County, arresting 15 people, confiscating cash and crops, illegally seizing medical records, and terrorizing unarmed, helpless people who suffer from cancer and other painful afflictions. Most importantly, of course, the raiders got a potent fix of their preferred narcotic -- the depraved thrill that comes from making powerless people submit to their whims.

It's hardly an exaggeration to characterize the Oakland County Narcotics Enforcement Team (NET) as the local "Gestapo." Agro  used that term to describe the ski mask-clad marauders who laid waste to his home, ripping apart furniture, throwing potting soil into the carpets and -- of course -- helping themselves to whatever cash they could find.

A similar home invasion robbery was carried out at the Lake Orion home of Agro's daughter-in-law. "She's approximately five-foot, weighs about eighty-nine pounds, and the masked officers put a shotgun in her face and told her to freeze," a wearily disgusted Agro recalled to a local reporter.

After learning about the raid, Agro went back to his house, which was swarming with armed tax-feeders.

"I asked what was going on, and they said, `Your house is being searched,'" Agro related. "I said, `Do you have a search warrant?' They said, `Yes.' I said, `Can I see it?' They said, `When we get ready to show it to you.'" Despite the fact that the invaders had a note from a judge supposedly authorizing them to trash Agro's home, the raid was, as the victim pointed out, an act of "illegal search and seizure," since the money and property that were stolen had nothing to do with a criminal act.

The same lawless behavior was on display at another facility called Everyone’s Café, where police threw cancer patients to the ground and held them at gunpoint. 

"What took place in Oakland is nothing short of armed robbery," protests Gersh Avery, a local medical marijuana activist. "Patients in those locations had nothing to do with the day-to-day operations, yet their medicine was forcibly taken from them." The NET, Avery concludes, "deliberately targeted sick innocent people."

The official sadism continued after the case was split into two groups of defendants. Judge Richard Kuhn of Michigan's 51st District Court in Waterford refused to waive a bond condition permitting the use of medical marijuana by defendants who had received medical authorization to do so. Astoundingly, 43rd District Judge Joe Longo, who is presiding over the case in Ferndale, permitted defendants with medical marijuana cards to continue using the palliative while out on bail. This, of course, begs the question of why those people are criminal defendants in the first place.

Oakland County Sheriff Mike Bouchard claims that the raid followed "undercover"  investigations of Clinical Relief and Everyone's Cafe. William Joseph Teichman, co-owner of Everyone's Cafe, insists that "We check the identification of every patient we deal with, and those undercover cops had either proper ID and paperwork or forgeries so good we couldn't tell the difference."

"I said `Hardhat'!"

In a post-raid press conference, Sheriff Bouchard -- grasping for a suitable soundbite -- described the local medical marijuana market as "something out of a bad Cheech and Chong Movie," without elaborating as to whether he considers "Up in Smoke" or "Nice Dreams" to be the gold standard of the stoner duo's cinematic output.

Bouchard himself essays a pretty decent impression of Sgt. Stedenko, the bullying, authoritarian narcotics officer who was a recurring nemesis in the comedy team's films.

Ryan Richmond, co-owner of Clinical Relief and one of the defendants in the Ferndale case, asserts that Bouchard "simply doesn't like the [Michigan state medical marijuana] law because it's too broad. If Bouchard has his way, we, you, have no rights even within the law."

Bouchard's critics are not limited to those he has arrested on marijuana-related charges.

"I personally don't understand why the county would use such a large amount of precious law enforcement resources on something like this," objects Ferndale Mayor Craig Covey. "This was obviously a political move by the sheriff to flex his muscles and send a message that he does not want medical marijuana clinics in Oakland County."

Covey also criticized "the use of SWAT teams with masked and armed officers ordering sick, elderly patients to the ground.... Now it's going to cost the taxpayers and the business owners hundreds of thousands of dollars in attorney fees to sort through this mess."

Bouchard's admitted purpose in staging the raids was not to enforce the existing law, but rather to create a "test case" intended to change it, either in substance or in application.  By strict definition, this was an exercise of violence against the helpless intended to bring about political change -- that is, an act of official terrorism.

Although Bouchard accuses medical marijuana advocates and providers of engaging in "organized crime," that description makes a much better fit when applied to the NET, which is a federally designated multi-agency task force.  Thanks to an indulgence granted by the so-called Department of Justice, the NET has a license to steal in the name of "asset forfeiture."

According to the Madison Heights Police Department's 2009 Annual Report, last year the NET seized a little more than a ton of marijuana and pilfered nearly $2 million through asset forfeiture. The August 26 raids pulled down tens of thousands of dollars in cash, including money the late Sal Agro and his wife Barbara had put aside toward the purchase of a new car.

Bouchard and Oakland County Prosecutor Jessica Cooper insist that the MMMA is dangerously ambiguous because it supposedly encourages people to flout the state's existing laws criminalizing the use and sale of marijuana for recreational purposes. They are correct in saying that the law is a masterpiece of self-contradiction, but emphatically wrong about the nature of the resulting danger: The risk of smoking weed without government permission is much less acute than that posed by power-intoxicated armed bureaucrats willing to carry out illegal paramilitary raids that target non-violent, chronically ill "offenders."

A concurring opinion by Judge P.J. O'Connell in a recent Michigan Court of Appeals case points out that "The MMMA does not codify a right to use marijuana; it merely provides a procedure through which seriously ill individuals using marijuana for its palliative effects can be identified and protected from prosecution under state law." It creates a narrow "affirmative defense to prosecutions under the Public Health Code, allowing an individual to use marijuana by freeing him or her from the threat of arrest and prosecution if that user meets all the requirements of the MMMA, while permitting prosecution under the Public Health Code if the individual fails to meet any of the requirements set forth under the MMMA."


The MMMA, furthermore, does not change the status of marijuana under state law, which lists the demonstrably harmless cannabinoid as a "Schedule 1" controlled substance" that has "no accepted medical use." What this means, in practice, is that anyone who uses or provides medical marijuana in strict fidelity of the terms and conditions dictated by the MMMA is still presumptively a criminal suspect.

Because of the incurable self-contradictions of the MMMA, Judge O'Connell warns, conscientious people who obey its provisions and seek marijuana for palliative care could still "lose both their property and their liberty" -- or even as the needless, government-inflicted death of Sal Agro demonstrates, their lives.

My earnest thanks to everyone who is helping to keep Pro Libertate on-line!

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"Showtime Syndrome" Strikes Las Vegas

Bryan Yant during his 2002 coroner's inquest.

"He made me do my job," insisted Bryan Yant when asked to explain why he gunned down 21-year-old Las Vegas resident Trevon Cole last June in what was clearly an act of criminal homicide.

Yant, who is employed by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police as an undercover counter-narcotics detective, claimed that Cole -- who was accused of selling 1.8 ounces of marijuana -- "made an aggressive act toward me," which was "enough to make me fear for my life."

Cole's finance, Sequoia Pearce, offers a much different story. She maintains that Cole was cooperative, putting up his hands and saying "All right -- all right" in the instant before Yant fatally shot him. At the time, Pearce -- who was nine months pregnant with the couple's child -- was kneeling on the floor with a gun to her head.

Of the six-member narcotics squad involved in the late evening raid on the tiny one-bedroom apartment, Yant was the only one who claimed that Cole made a "furtive movement." Interestingly, he was also the only one carrying an assault rifle.

Unlike his comrades, who were armed with with department-issued handguns, the former Marine decided to bring along his personal AR-15. This isn't to say that the co-assailants earn points for restraint, given that the entire raid was an exercise in overkill. Trevon Cole's needless death was an outcome nearly as predictable as the result of the perfunctory coroner's inquest, which ruled that the murder was a "justifiable" exercise of lethal force.

On three separate occasions in the weeks leading up to the June 11 raid, police "arranged to meet with Trevon in the parking lot of his apartment complex" to conduct drug buys, attorney Andre Lagomarsino told Pro Libertate. "Trevon was never armed or dangerous, and he wasn't exactly a high-rolling dealer either, given the fact that he didn't even have a car." 

In the hours leading up to the raid, "the police had the apartment under surveillance, and they knew that there was a pregnant woman in that room," continues Lagomarsino. "They had already established that this guy wasn't a threat. They had probable cause to arrest Trevon; why didn't they simply arrange to meet him in the parking lot and cuff him, and then execute a search?"

Nevada law doesn't criminalize individual possession of up to an ounce of marijuana. Each of the "controlled buys" the police set up with Cole involved amounts he could legally possess. The cops tried, without success, to bait Cole into selling larger amounts.

Although the police -- with the help of a camera crew from Langley Productions, which produces the execrable COPS "reality TV" series -- had captured Trevon Cole selling marijuana on video, the affidavit Yant filed to obtain an arrest warrant was fatally flawed. (Remember the COPS connection; we'll return to it anon.)

Trevon and Sequoia in happier times.

Yant misidentified the Las Vegas resident as another individual -- a Houston resident with a lengthy criminal record. The two men -- who had different birthdays and middle names -- looked nothing like each other. Trevon, a former college football player, was roughly 100 pounds heavier and three inches taller than the individual described in the affidavit. 

It's impossible to dismiss Yant's misrepresentation as an innocent mistake. He had all the necessary information from Cole's California driver's license. Rather than correctly describing the subject as a young man with no prior criminal record, Yant depicted him as a dangerous repeat offender. This, in turn, prompted a judge to approve Yant's request for an armed, night-time raid on Cole's apartment. Res ipsa loquitir.

 When the cops invaded Cole's apartment, the lights were out and a television offered the only illumination. In defiance of protocol, Yant -- acting without backup -- kicked in the bathroom door. He found Cole squatting in front of the toilet, apparently trying to dispose of a minuscule amount of marijuana. 

 

According to the story Yant told the inquest, Cole "turned towards me, rotated his body," and assumed a shooter's stance. The detective was supposedly able to see all of this despite the fact that it was dark and the barrel-mounted flashlight on his rifle wasn't working.

That account can't be reconciled with the findings of Dr. Lisa Gavin, a medical examiner with the Clark County Coroner's Office, who said that the physical evidence shows Cole was facing away from Yant when he was fatally shot. The bullet that killed Cole followed a downward trajectory through his cheek into his neck. 

During the inquest, Assistant District Attorney Chris Owens suggested that this was "consistent" with an accidental discharge of Yant's rifle as he kicked in the door. However, Pearce insists that Cole had sufficient time to raise his hands and signal his compliance before Yant gunned him down. Her account actually confirms Yant's testimony that the gunshot was a deliberate act, not an accidental discharge. 

When coupled with forensic evidence indicating that Cole was shot from behind, this looks suspiciously like an execution-style murder -- or at the very least, something that should be prosecuted as an act of criminal homicide. Thanks to a system designed to validate questionable use of lethal force by police, Yant may conceivably lose his job, but he won't be put on trial.

Lagomarsino, who is preparing a lawsuit against the Las Vegas Metro Police on behalf of  Cole's family and former fiance, describes the County Coroner Inquest procedure as "a kangaroo court and a dog and pony show." That is also the view of Don Chairez, a former Nevada District Court Judge who is a current candidate to be Clark County District Attorney. Chairez, who describes the typical inquest as "a search for justification of an officer's actions."

Inquest critic: DA candidate Chairez.

The inquest procedure was introduced in 1969. Since 1976, more than two hundred lethal force incidents have been examined by a seven-member jury. Only one of them was ruled "negligent" -- and that decision was overturned on appeal. This isn't a surprising result, given that the inquest procedure is designed to be collaborative, rather than adversarial: The D.A.'s office literally orchestrates the questioning with the police department prior to the hearing. 

Lagomarsino observes that no cross-examination of police officers is permitted. "We were allowed to submit written questions, one at a time, to the prosecutor, but we couldn't cross-examine Yant" or even ask follow-up questions, he told Pro Libertate. The prosecutors don't bother to present a summation for the jury, and established procedures also permit judges to offer what Lagomarsino called "very vague" instructions to the jury. 

 Additionally, jury nullification would avail little in this setting, since the inquest -- unlike a grand jury -- cannot return an indictment. At the end of the inquest into the Trevon Cole shooting, comments Don Chairez, it appeared that the judge "was almost asking for a directed verdict."

This wasn't the first time a coroner's inquest has rescued Bryan Yant. In 2002, Yant,  at the time a 25-year-old street officer, shot robbery suspect Richard Travis Brown following a foot pursuit. Yant claimed that he had returned fire after Brown shot at him during the chase. Eventually Brown "buckled and fell face-first on the ground," Yant told the inquest. Sprawled on the ground with a "wild-eyed look," Brown supposedly pointed his gun at the officer, who unloaded the volley that killed him.

Brown was being pursued as a suspect in a violent crime. But he shouldn't have been summarily executed -- which is what apparently happened to him, given that the gun he supposedly pointed at Yant was found 35 feet from the spot where the officer shot him to death. This oddity didn't prevent the inquest from quickly validating Yant's actions as "justifiable."

Yant's "error" in describing an entirely different person in his arrest affidavit for Trevon Cole was hardly his first "mistake" of that kind. According to the Las Vegas Review Journal, Yant "is under investigation for apparently lying about drugs he didn't seize and actions he didn't take during a 2009 police raid that never happened."

More than a year before compiling an arrest affidavit that contained "gross misstatements about Cole's criminal history," Yant and fellow Officer David Goris falsely reported that "they sat in a car [and observed] ... while a confidential informant bought drugs from a man they identified as William Sigler," reports the Review Journal. "That alleged buy was used to justify a nighttime search of Sigler's home 12 days later. Police arrested Sigler and his girlfriend and seized prescription drugs, marijuana and cocaine from the home."

However, the charges were thrown out last week when it was established that "the informant did not buy drugs from Sigler." At the time the "controlled buy" purportedly took place, Sigler was in the Bahamas.

During the January 2009 raid on Sigler's residence, "Yant tore up and left three documents ... [describing] a different raid of Sigler's home, one that never took place," continues the paper. A "declaration of arrest" form claimed that police had detained suspects and collected evidence at Sigler's home in a December 2009 raid. "Evidence" supposedly collected in that fictitious raid supposedly tested positive for cocaine. All of this was was unalloyed perjury.

Ready for my close-up: Sheriff Gillespie.

At present, Yant remains on paid vacation. Clark County Sheriff Douglas Gillespie insists that the coroner's inquest conducted by his office was the epitome of institutional transparency. Gillespie acknowledges that there is room for improvement in the procedure for serving narcotics warrants -- which is why this task will now be assigned to the Las Vegas SWAT team. 

Bear in mind that militarizing the execution of arrest warrants is presented here as a "reform" triggered by an incident involving the needless use of lethal force. It's not obvious how this policy change would reduce the likelihood of unnecessary civilian deaths. It is obvious, however, that SWAT teams are much more telegenic than run-of-the-mill counter-narcotics units -- and there's reason to believe that Sheriff Gillespie, like Detroit's recently ousted police chief Warren Evans, is playing to the "reality TV" audience. 

In May, the Las Vegas Tribune described a "mandatory meeting" called by Lieutenant Clinton Nichols that involved "more than thirty detectives" from the Metro Police Department. The detectives "were introduced to four civilian visitors, [who] were the production staff of the `COPS' reality show. All thirty-three detectives with the robbery division were ordered, by the supervisory staff ... to cooperate, participate and assist all four of those television producers while in Las Vegas...."

Detective Gordon Martines, a 36-year veteran police officer, was among those present at that gathering. Martines asked Langley Productions representative Susan Carney "who ordered the production." According to Martines and at least one other officer who witnessed the conversation, Carney replied: "The Sheriff ordered this; we are here to help him with his campaign for re-election."

That statement was greeted with expressions of stunned disbelief from the officers. Carney broke the awkward silence by asking if she had said something wrong.

Gordon Martines

"Maybe we should introduce you to Sheriff candidate Martines," one of the other officers tersely explained.

On May 7, continued the Tribune, Martines filed a complaint with Nevada Secretary of State Ross Miller alleging that Gillespie had violated election laws by using the television production company as a taxpayer-subsidized propaganda vehicle.

By any rational standard, it's an act of corruption for a Sheriff or police chief to enlist the officers under his command as armed bit players in an election-year "reality" show -- and it's likely that Gillespie's torqued priorities contributed to Trevon Cole's eminently avoidable violent death.


The meeting described by Martines occurred before the COPS film crew recorded the "controlled buys" outside Trevon Cole's apartment complex -- stings in which the police tried, unsuccessfully, to lure Cole into selling them cocaine and firearms. According to several accounts, the COPS film crew was supposed to be "embedded" with Yant's home invasion squad during the June 11 raid, but wasn't available. That would explain why the serial killer and impenitent perjurer who led that raid selected a big-ass gun that would look good on TV, rather than being content with his department-issued sidearm.

In a rational world, nobody would be punished (let alone killed) for selling or consuming marijuana. Trevon "most likely would have gotten probation, given his lack of a criminal background," according to Lagomarsino -- if his arrest had been carried out by peace officers, rather than paramilitary poseurs.

Gunned down: Erik Scott.

On September 22, the same inquest system that has repeatedly exonerated Bryan Yant will meet to ratify the actions of the Metro police officers who gunned down Erik Scott a month after the killing of Trevon Cole.

The 39-year-old West Point graduate was shot seven times by three officers in the parking lot of a Costco store. Metro Captain Patrick Neville said the police had responded to complaints that Scott was armed and behaving erratically.

Scott, who had a concealed weapons permit, was carrying two weapons at the time he was killed. Neville claims that "a dozen witnesses" saw Scott pull a gun. That account is disputed by many other eyewitnesses who were present at the crowded retail store on a busy Saturday afternoon. Significantly, the relevant security camera video has been withheld, and the police have suggested that the most crucial video evidence may be lost to a mysterious -- albeit oddly predictable -- "glitch. "

"Showtime Syndrome" probably didn't play a significant role in the killing of Erik Scott, which was most likely a product of police over-reaction to the presence of an armed citizen. His father, William Scott, is an aviation journalist of national stature with "extensive contacts in military and intelligence circles."

Thanks to William Scott's influence, there is an anorexically slender possibility that the coroner's inquest will be a legitimate investigation. If this does happen, more that a few Las Vegas residents will be prompted to ask why the same wasn't true in the case of Trevon Cole. That's when things could get really interesting....

Thank You

Once again I'm overwhelmed and profoundly grateful to those who have donated so generously over the past several days. This means more to me than I can adequately express. God bless each and all of you.

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The Regime's War on Food (Updated, July 25)

Enemies of food fascism: Max Kane (left) and Canadian dairy farmer Michael Schmidt

Many thousands of years ago, two men came across a dairy cow, a beast neither had previously beheld. 

One of them, seeking to impress the other, pointed to the creature's udder and declared: "You see those things dangling from the underside of that animal? Well, I'm going to squeeze one of them and drink whatever comes out of it!"

According to the late and much-missed George Carlin, that nameless daredevil was the bravest man who ever lived. He was also exceptionally fortunate, since he was able to consume raw milk, and even extol its nutritional benefits, without running the risk of imprisonment.

"I drink raw milk, sold illegally on the underground black market," admits organic farmer and polymath Joel F. Salatin in the foreword to David Gumpert's book The Raw Milk Revolution: Behind America's Emerging Battle over Food Rights.  "I grew up on raw milk, from our own Guernsey cows that our family hand-milked twice a day. We made yogurt, ice cream, butter and cottage cheese. All through high school in the early 1970s, I sold our homemade yogurt, butter, buttermilk, and cottage cheese at the curb market on Saturday mornings."

Udder nonsense: The FDA considers this a death dispenser.

This was possible only because our rulers -- who plunder our earnings to subsidize production of government-approved toxins such as high fructose corn syrup, and don't hesitate to confer the "safe foods" label on Twinkies and other hydrogenated wads of incremental death  -- hadn't yet decided to protect us from the scourge of unprocessed natural foods, such as raw milk.


That oversight has since been corrected. As a result, explains Salatin, home dairy producers like the family in which he grew up are forbidden to sell their products at a contemporary farmer's market.

It isn't an exaggeration to say that the Regime is conducting a low-grade war against producers and consumers of raw milk -- a campaign that bears an undeniable family resemblance to the murderous, decades-long farce called the War on Drugs. It shouldn't come as a surprise to learn that a government presuming to dictate to us what mood-altering substances we can consume would likewise presume to tell us what foods we can eat and offer to others.

The federal Food and Drug Administration, working through a multi-state network of sycophants, is treating the private distribution of raw milk as a species of criminal conspiracy. Borrowing a tactic employed in the War on Drugs, the Feds are seeking to extort the cooperation of some consumers to work as informants.


Wisconsin resident and raw milk consumer Max Kane was targeted for that treatment, but refused to submit.  As a result, Kane may wind up in prison for the supposed offense of drinking raw milk and sharing it with others.

As a child, Kane was diagnosed with Crohn's Disease, a gastrointestinal disorder that left him chronically weak, malnourished, and -- as he put it -- "wasting away."

At his adult height of 5'11", Kane weighed 110 pounds. After conventional medical treatment availed nothing, Kane sought an answer in nutrition; he found one in a diet of raw foods, including raw, unpasteurized milk.

Kane insists that raw milk and dairy products helped him attain the vibrant health he displayed to good advantage by staging a 40-day bicycle across the continental U.S. During that odyssey, Kane consumed only the dairy products supplied by farmers belonging to a nation-wide network of raw milk producers.

According to raw milk proponents, pasteurization destroys not only harmful pathogens, but also beneficial bacteria needed to maintain a healthy balance of gastrointestinal flora (a subject about which I acquired some hard-won knowledge about a year ago). Homogenization further denatures milk, depriving it of vital alkalizing minerals that can bind with toxins and remove them from the body. 

There are trade-offs involved whether one chooses to consume milk in its raw or pasteurized/homogenized form. Furthermore, there are some accomplished health and fitness experts -- among them the legendary nonagenarian stud Jack LaLane -- who insist that human beings have no business consuming dairy products at all.

Apart from the paternalistic assumptions favored by our self-appointed bureaucratic custodians, there's no reason to believe that individuals are incapable of making healthy decisions for themselves. As Kane points out, his case is a dispute over property rights in the most elemental terms. "My body is my private property," he explains. "Nobody gets to say what I eat except me."

Although the government that afflicts Wisconsin insists it is "illegal" to sell raw milk, the law contains no impediment to direct sale of milk by farmers to consumers. Kane, who founded the Raw Milk Party, lives with his wife and young children in Viroqua, a town of roughly 4400 people that prides itself on its organic farming and farmer's markets. He belongs to a "cow share" co-op, whose members receive raw milk in exchange for paying a portion of the upkeep of the animals.

Like similar private ventures across the country, Kane's co-op is a subscription-based arrangement, which means that it deals with members, not customers. Kane sells his raw milk to another membership-based food club in Chicago called Belle's Lunchbox. In late 2008, Kane's club came under scrutiny by both federal regulators and Wisconsin's Department of Justice and Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection (DATCP) following a conveniently anonymous complaint from an Illinois resident supposedly took ill after consuming unpasteurized milk.

Georgia raw milk farmers were forced to destroy their inventory.

The milk was traced to farms in Wisconsin, and the federal anti-raw milk gestapo -- already working with state counterparts in Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin to crack down on the distribution of raw milk and other natural foods -- dispatched functionaries to test for brucella and other pathogens.

 Unfortunately for them, the tests proved negative, so they were deprived of a vital propaganda tool.


"I hope I don't come to resent making this statement," wrote Wisconsin veterinary commissar Roger Ehlenfeldt in a December 19, 2008 e-mail to his comrades, "but the Brucellosis issue may have been the simplest part of this problem and could have been a pretty good lever to use to push the raw milk issue." ( Emphasis added.)

Mark this well: The chief concern expressed here was not for the health and well-being of the public, but rather regret over the loss of an opportunity to exploit suffering in order to restrict the freedom of others.

Deprived of that "lever," the federal food fascisti attempted to pressure Kane into informing on others involved in the "criminal" purveyance of pure milk.

Despite the fact that Kane has never been accused of a crime, he confronts the possibility of criminal contempt charges for his refusal to provide names, addresses, and other information about people who belong to his raw milk club.

Last June 18, Kane was summoned by Wisconsin State assistant Attorney General Philip Ferris to offer a deposition. Kane, who has always represented himself in court, wisely refused to answer any questions until and unless his constitutionally protected rights were explicitly recognized by Ferris. For his part, Ferris adamantly refused even to admit on record that he had sworn an oath to uphold the U.S. and state constitutions -- a refusal that is tacit admission that his oath was an act of public perjury.

Ferris, thoroughly out-lawyered by an amateur, got nothing. Kane responded to the subpoena by challenging the constitutionality of Wisconsin's anti-raw milk statutes. This prompted the State of Wisconsin to escalate its assault by using the threat of criminal contempt charges in an attempt to extort Kane's cooperation. The term "extortion" is the only suitable one to describe what's happening here, since nobody has ever signed a criminal complaint against Kane or any of his associates.  Despite that fact, the Wisconsin AG's office filed a motion to have Kane designated a "threat to the public" and imprisoned while his appeal proceeded through the courts.

In an April 19 hearing, Vernon County Judge Michael Rosborough denied the state's vindictive motion to imprison the 32-year-old farmer and granted Kane sufficient time to collect transcripts and prepare for his appeal.

The standoff in Wisconsin represents just one front in the Regime's war against people who produce and consume raw milk. David Gumpert (author of The Raw Milk Revolution) offers a rundown of some other recent outrages.

 "[In early June], agents of the Minnesota Department of Agriculture, escorted by police and also bearing search warrants, raided and shut down Traditional Foods Warehouse, a popular food club in Minneapolis specializing in locally-produced foods," writes Gumpert. "They also raided two farms suspected of illegally selling raw milk. And in a national first among such raids, agents searched a private home and made off with computers; the family's offense appears to have been that it allowed one of the raw dairy farmers to park in its driveway to distribute raw milk to area residents who had ordered it."

In California, Gumpert relates, a mob of 20 armed tax-feeders -- including personnel from two sheriff's offices, the LA County District Attorney's office, and the California Department of Food and Agriculture -- descended on Sharon Palmer's Ventura County farm. Palmer has endured three assaults of this kind over the past 18 months, apparently as a result of a technical error in the labeling of goat's milk.

Actor George Lopez with raw milk farmer Mark McAfee

 On the same day, government goons laid siege to Rawsome Foods, a Venice, California food club that offers a variety of unprocessed dairy products. The marauders made off with a large haul of raw honey and dairy products before shuttering the private club for failure to obtain a health permit.

To his considerable credit, Rawsome owner Aajonus Vonderplanitz -- who has endured in-person harassment by the FBI and FDA -- re-opened his club just hours after the government-licensed vandals had wrecked it.

These raids -- and scores of others like them -- are part of a coordinated campaign by the Federal Government to arrest "the spread of private food groups that have sprung up around the country in recent years -- food clubs and buying groups to provide specialized local products that are generally unavailable in groceries, like grass-fed meats, pastured [not pasteurized] eggs, fermented foods, and, in some cases, raw dairy products," observes Gumpert. "Because they are private and limited to consumers who sign up for membership, these groups generally avoid obtaining retail and public health licensed required of retailers that sell to the general public."

All of this is dictated by the basic totalitarian formula: Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state. Private food clubs, like every other association, simply have to be brought under state control, or destroyed in a fit of coercive benevolence.

We also shouldn't underestimate the Regime's irrepressible hostility toward any enterprise that promotes self-sufficiency: Witness the premonitory rumblings of a new Federal jihad against the precious metals industry.
 
As the Greater Depression deepens and large-scale retail distribution networks collapse, Americans will increasingly rely on locally produced foods -- an ironically beneficial side effect of the economic meltdown. In the fact that the Regime has chosen, in this economic environment, to mount a persecution campaign against independent local food producers we find eloquent testimony of its incurable malevolence.

Update, July 25: 

Courtesy of the Los Angeles Times (by way of The Agitator) comes the video record of the armed raid on Rawsome Foods -- and yes, the wankers in government-issued costumes did enter the establishment with their guns drawn.

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Dum spiro, pugno!

Clemency for Wall Street Criminals, Prison for the Powerless

A little help from a passive victim: Why did he hold still?

"Who the hell are these people?"

"I don't know. I used to say they were the same ones we've always had to deal with. Same ones my granddaddy had to deal with. Back then they was russlin' cattle. Now they're running dope. I ain't sure we've seen these people before. Their kind. I don't know what to do about 'em even. If you killed 'em all they'd have to build an annex on to hell."

Sheriff Bell, from Cormac McCarthy's novel No Country for Old Men

  

Johnny Gaskins of Raleigh, North Carolina faces a 30-year prison term -- an effective life sentence --  for the supposed crime of depositing $450,000 in his own bank account. The corporate leaders of Wachovia Bank, a criminal syndicate once headquartered in the same state, won't face prosecution despite admissions that the laundered hundreds of billions of dollars on behalf of Mexican narcotics cartels. 

Wachovia was deemed "too big to fail," and thus too important to prosecute. In our system, mercy is reserved exclusively for the powerful and corrupt, and Johnny Gaskins -- a criminal defense attorney -- was neither. 

Gaskins had earned his money legitimately. As a dutiful tax victim, he reported his income to the criminal predators running the IRS. His purported offense was to make numerous deposits in amounts just under the $10,000 threshold at which banks are required to report to the IRS under the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970.

Punishment without a crime: Gaskins.

Displaying the proprietary blend of depraved creativity and utter dishonesty that typify their caste, federal prosecutors insisted that these innocuous acts constituted the alleged crime of "money structuring." 

Dr. William Anderson, an economics professor at Maryland's Frostburg State University, notes that "money structuring" was defined as "an `ancillary crime' to give prosecutors leverage in cases where people had amassed huge amounts of cash via drug sales or other illegal activities and were trying to avoid detection as well as avoid paying taxes on their money."

In Gaskins's case, there was no predicate offense. The money was honestly earned and duly reported. Yet according to Pecksniffian federal prosecutor Randall Galyon, "The point of the law is to make sure we don't have people trying to fool the bank. The fact that he was trying is against the law." 

Gaskins was trying to "fool" the bank about conduct that was not innately criminal.  His violations of technical statutes constituted an offense of a severity comparable to ripping the tag from a mattress.

Yet the sacred majesty of the law requires that Gaskins suffer exemplary, conspicuous punishment. 

As Dr. Anderson observes, there was an unambiguous element of payback behind this vindictive prosecution: "Gaskins had success representing people accused of crimes, and the police and prosecutors paid him back with what can only be a trumped-up charge. Remember, Gaskins was convicted of depositing money in a bank. He did not evade taxes, he did not gain his cash through illegal means, he just put the money in the bank."

For reasons unstated yet deafening in their obviousness, the same corps of federal prosecutors who went after Gaskins hammer and tongs last year displayed little of the same zeal in pursuing Wachovia Bank on charges that involve both deliberate fraud and financial collaboration with Mexican narco-criminal syndicates. 

Wachovia's corporate headquarters are in Charlotte, North Carolina -- just a three-hour drive from Raleigh. Perhaps the heroes who brought Johnny Gaskins to book were simply too exhausted from that herculean task to grapple with Wachovia, which was absorbed by Wells Fargo in a federally engineered takeover. The details are predictably opaque, but Wells Fargo -- which initially resisted string-laden TARP subsidies -- was given $25 billion by the Feds after it bought out Wachovia, which was collapsing under the accumulated weight of its rotten debts. 

Although it proudly called itself "the nation's fourth-largest bank," Wachovia was actually a federally chartered criminal enterprise. 

Granted, this can accurately be said of the entire fractional-reserve banking system. Wachovia distinguished itself by becoming a full-service institution to swindlers and criminals of many kinds. 



In February 2008 it was revealed that Wachovia's corporate leadership "solicited business from companies it knew had been accused of telemarketing crimes," reported the New York Times. "Internal Wachovia e-mail messages, for example, show that high-ranking employees ... frequently warned colleagues about telemarketing frauds routed through its accounts." 


Wachovia had been given specific warnings from investigators and from other banks regarding the scams, yet "it continued to provide banking services to multiple companies that helped steal as much as $400 million from unsuspecting victims." 

A federal lawsuit against Wachovia accused the bank of accepting "fraudulent, unsigned checks that withdrew funds from the accounts of victims, often elderly," continues the Times. "Wachovia forwarded those checks to other banks that were unaware of the frauds, which in turn sent money to the swindlers." 


One Wachovia executive warned in 2005 that one account being used by swindlers had received 4,500 complaints in the space of two months. "There is more," she wrote, "but nothing more that I want to put in a note." 


Despite that warning and others, Wachovia continued to process the fraudulent transactions "partly because the bank charged fraud artists a large fee every time a victim spotted a bogus transaction and demanded their money back," the Times points out. "One company alone paid Wachovia about $1.5 million over 11 months...." 


"We are making a ton of money from them," admitted Wachovia executive Linda Pera in 2005, referring to a company later accused of stealing $142 million through fraud. 


Rather than doing what it could to stop the swindle, Wachovia profited from it as long as it could. The bank's role in that scam -- as well as mortgage fraud, embezzlement, and other crimes -- was known by federal regulators and prosecutors no later than February 2008. Nobody at Wachovia faced criminal prosecution. Instead, the bank was permitted to buy its way out of trouble through a $144 million settlement -- and taxpayers were forced to make good on that amount, and much more, a few months later in the federally subsidized merger with Wells Fargo. 

Last March, federal prosecutors offered an even more generous deal to the Wachovia cabal in the form of a"deferred prosecution agreement" regarding charges of laundering an estimated $300 billion for Mexican narcotics syndicates. In lieu of prosecution, Wachovia agreed to the criminal forfeiture of $110 million and a $50,000,000 fine; it also promised to "demonstrate its future good conduct and compliance in all material aspects with the Bank Secrecy Act...."


The Bank Secrecy Act, recall, is the same law Johnny Gaskins "violated" by making small bank deposits of his own honestly-earned, fully reported money. Gaskins wasn't offered a deal in which he would "forfeit" an amount equivalent to pennies on the dollar and be spared additional punishment in exchange for the promise of future "good conduct."


According to the stipulations in the federal "Factual Statement" Wachovia endorsed last March, a Miami branch maintained "correspondent bank accounts" for Mexican currency exchange houses (casas de cambio, or CDCs).


"On numerous occasions, monies were deposited into a CDC by a drug trafficking organization," recounts the "Factual Statement." "Using false identities, the CDC then wired that money through its Wachovia correspondent bank accounts for the purchase of airplanes for drug trafficking organizations." 


Among the offenses to which Wachovia stipulated are "Structured Wire Transactions" intended to launder drug proceeds. Once again, Gaskins was convicted of "money structuring" despite the fact that there was no underlying criminal act. Wachovia, on the other hand, was deliberately washing drug proceeds and facilitating the purchase of aircraft that were used to smuggle at least 22 tons of cocaine.

In 2006, Martin Woods, a Wachovia compliance officer in London, became suspicious when his branch started to receive a large quantity of traveler's checks issued by Mexican CDCs. The checks -- written for large denominations -- were sequentially numbered and improperly endorsed.

Recognizing this as evidence of money laundering, Woods reported his findings to Britain's Serious Organised Crime Agency. A year later, Mexican investigators traced those checks to a CDC used by the Sinaloa Cartel. 

Martin's reward for breaking the case, observed the March 9, 2009 issue of Barron's, was to be bullied and demoted by his superiors at Wachovia, who also threw out his reports of similar suspicious activities in eastern Europe. As was the case with the telemarketing fraud, the dirty dealings Martin had uncovered were much too profitable to stop -- and in this case, they were being overseen by people who make Anton Chigurh look like Mr. Rogers.

In September 2007, a U.S. registered Gulfstream II jet carrying 3.3 tons of cocaine crashed in the Yucatan Peninsula. The plane was one of several purchased through a Mexican CDC with "correspondent accounts" held by Wachovia. This particular private jet -- tail number N987SA -- was also an important link between the CIA-abetted international narcotics trade and the CIA's global torture network.

Multi- use asset: A CIA "torture taxi" takes flight...

Until a few weeks before the crash, the plane's registered owner was a Florida-based pilot (and alleged CIA asset) named Greg Smith, who was reportedly involved in a series of federal operations targeting Columbian drug networks from1997-2000. 

Only those so ingenuous as to make Candide look worldly would be surprised to learn that the same individual, and the same aircraft, were involved in smuggling drugs into the United States, or that the CIA found even more repellent uses for the same vehicle.


Mr. "Smith" was the Gulfstream's owner of record between 2003 and 2005, when the plane was used by the CIA for at least three trips between the east coast of the U.S. and the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay.

The same plane was part of the CIA's fleet of "torture taxis" used to ferry detainees to foreign dungeons, reported The Independent of London last January. 

"In 2004, another torture taxi crashed in a field in Nicaragua with a ton of cocaine aboard," the Independent recalls. "It had been identified by Britain and the European Parliament's temporary committee on the alleged use of European countries by the CIA for the transport and illegal detention of prisoners as a frequent visitor in 2004 and 2005 to British, Cypriot, Czech, German, Greek, Hungarian, Spanish and other European cities with its cargo of captives for secret imprisonment and torture in Iraq, Jordan and Azerbaijan."

.... wreckage of the same plane, and its cargo of cocaine.

The gentle treatment given to Wachovia testifies of its value as a pass-through to fund criminal syndicates used by the CIA to conduct the business of perpetual war -- whether it's designated the "war on drugs" or the "war on terror."

To cite Bastiat's invaluable formula yet again, both of those "wars" are exercises in creating the poison and the antidote in the same laboratory. 

The "war on drugs" -- which is an exercise in corrupt, murderous foolishness greater, by several orders of magnitude, than Prohibition -- will not end as long as it is profitable to the criminal elite in Washington, their allies in the banking industry, and their largely interchangeable and thoroughly disposable minions in the underworld. 
 
As Hugh O'Shaughnessy of The Independent puts it, decriminalization of drug use would impoverish "the traffickers, large and small, and those who have been making good money building and running the new prisons that help to bankrupt governments -- in the US in particular, where drug offenders -- principally small retailers and seldom the rich and important wholesalers -- have helped to push the prison population to 1,600,000." 

That population will soon include Johnnie Gaskins, a principled but powerless man who committed no crime. The majesty of the law requires nothing less. None of the criminals in Wachovia's corporate leadership will be joining him behind bars, of course, since clemency is a gift the Regime bestows exclusively on its valued accomplices in official crime.

(Note: This essay was originally published under a different title.)

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