Flesh For War Fantasies

One significant problem with being an Empire: Everything is supposedly "our" business.

To my considerable shame, I just realized that it had been a long time since I had thought of Angola. In fact, it occurs to me that I really don't have a feeling toward that country one way or another.

How utterly scandalous this is. I obviously suffer from a severely parochial worldview, if not outright bigotry. All decent people are required to take an interest in Angolan affairs, and to work on behalf of that nation's survival.

Whoops – I made a mistake. It was Austria I had forgotten, not Angola – an easy mistake, I suppose, given that the names of those countries are similar, if little else about them is. Austria is the nation that is supposed to hold captive all of my waking thoughts, and dominate the dreams that come once my eyes surrender to weariness at day's end.

Oh. Sorry. My bad.

It turns out that the small foreign country I'm morally obliged to care about is Guatemala, where I lived for a little more than a year in the 1980s --

Now, this has become simply obnoxious. Sierra Leone, that tragic land, scene of some of the most horrific atrocities of recent memory, is the country that should always be uppermost in my thoughts, lest I be accused of indifference to genocide.

Admittedly, it's difficult to keep track of which distant, unfamiliar country should by the focus of my concerns – to such an extent that I would be willing to surrender the blood of my children in its defense.

Perhaps the issue could be clarified if the regime running that country could stage a PR campaign in which its government shamelessly pimps several young female military veterans by having them pose in borderline pornographic photo spreads for Maxim magazine.

We have a winner! The nation in question is, of course, Israel.

Like much of the evil done in this world, the idea of a Maxim photo feature on Israeli women (starring former Miss Israel Gal Gadot) originated in New York, more specifically at the Israeli consulate, “where research showed that Israel meant little to young American men” in the all-important 18-35 demographic, reports the AP.

Former Miss Israel Gal Gadot, featured in the Israeli regime's quasi-porn propaganda campaign, seen here in suitable attire.

“Males that age have no feeling toward Israel one way or another, and we view that as a problem, so we came up with an idea that would be appealing to them,” explains an Israeli government media adviser named David Dorfman. Thus Maxim was contacted by the Israeli consulate and asked to take part in “reshaping Israel's public image.”

What neither the Dorfster nor any of his allies in this effort would explain is this: Why is it obligatory for American males of any age -- let alone those in an age bracket targeted for military recruitment -- to have feelings of any sort about a country to which they have no organic connection or moral responsibility?

Israel can expect the allegiance of its citizens, and for understandable reasons Jews in every nation take an interest in its survival. But I cannot think of a compelling reason why the typical American should take a greater interest in Israel than he does in Angola, Austria, Guatemala, or Sierra Leone.

Ecclesio-Leninists of John Hagee's ilk would insist that Christians have a God-prescribed duty to support the Israeli government, to the point of mass bloodshed, if necessary. Since Hagee considers it just and meet to kill on Israel's behalf, I wonder if he would consider it appropriate to peddle quasi-porn, and consume the same, in that cause. (I'm suddenly afflicted with a mental image of Hagee poring over the pages of the July installment of Maxim, his wattles quivering and his eyes distended as he succumbs to a combination of sanctimony and salacity).

Hagee is precisely the kind of "friend to Israel" whose preferred policies would kill a lot of Israelis and other innocent people. He really should pause and ask himself if a government that would exploit prurient interests in this fashion (not to mention sponsoring "Gay Pride" parades) is really the Zion longed for by prophets and saints of ages past. From where I sit, that government appears no better or worse than any of a dozen others I could name, our own most definitely included.

While the Israeli consulate in New York prepares to fire the Maxim gun in its propaganda arsenal, the War Party is pursuing a somewhat subtler approach in preparing the public for a US/Israeli attack on Iran. Yesterday (June 20) the House of Representatives passed a resolution demanding that the UN Security Council “charge Iranian President Maumoud Ahmadinejad with violating the 1948 Convention on the Prevention of the Crime of Genocide,” and that the Council consider unspecified “measures” to “prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons....”

The resolution regurgitates the claim, which has been canonized through repetition although patently and demonstrably false, that Ahmadinejad “called for Israel to be `wiped off the map'.” While the Iranian president is a certifiable maniac guilty of many crimes against decency, that phrase was not uttered by him: He was, in fact, calling for what is now “regime change” by calling for an end to the Israeli government, not the annihilation of the Israeli people. If calling for “regime change” is now to be considered an incitement to genocide, the entire staff of the American Enterprise Institute should be seized and extradited to stand trial before the UN International Criminal Court in the Hague.

Only two congressmen, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) and Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), voted against the resolution. Kucinich “attempted to have read into the record alternate translations of Ahmadinejad's remarks that suggest the Iranian leader was calling Israel to come to an end through democratic means, and not through violence,” reported the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

While describing himself as “unequivocal in my support for the security and survival of Israel” and possessed of “serious concerns with the remarks made by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,” Kucinich denounced the resolution, correctly describing it as an attempt to “lay the groundwork for an offensive, unprovoked war” -- one in which Israelis, as well as Americans and Iranians, would be killed, and that will probably ignite a broader conflict lasting for years or even decades.

And that is an obscenity far greater than anything available in the pages of Maxim.

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10,000 Ways To Die

“It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?...

Every new regulation ... presents a new harvest to those who watch the change, and can trace its consequences; a harvest, reared not by themselves, but by the toils and cares of the great body of their fellow-citizens. This is a state of things in which it may be said with some truth that laws are made for the FEW, not for the MANY.”

James Madison, Federalist Paper 62*

In 1791, when the republic Madison and his colleagues created was new and the Constitution enjoyed a decent chance of survival, there were 17 federal criminal statutes on the books. Two hundred years later, that figure had grown to several thousand.

Given the protean nature of the federal criminal code, more specificity about that figure is impossible: Every congressional session results in a new set of legal instruments intended for use in the corrupt “harvest” referred to by Madison. The Federalist essay containing that figure of speech, incidentally, argued that the federal legislative branch would be a check against the heedless proliferation of recondite laws. If only it were so.

More than half of the countless thousands of federal laws enacted since the War Between the States, notes Ted Gest of the University of Pennsylvania, were passed after 1970. Delaware Senator Joe Biden, who has done more than his share to abet the malignant growth of the federal criminal code, proudly explains: “We federalize everything that walks, talks, and moves,”

In his book Crime & Politics: Big Government's Erratic Campaign for Law and Order, Gest points out that since “it's possible to identify some interstate nexus with virtually any crime, just about anything goes when it comes to making a theoretical federal case for some category of violations.”

Obviously, this represents an inversion of the constitutional order described by Madison in Federalist number 45, in which the central government would have “few and defined” powers, and the “numerous and indefinite”powers reserved to the states would include practically everything having to do with criminal justice and law enforcement.

Of course, States, counties, and municipalities emit countless laws as well, most of them quite foolish, almost all of them unnecessary. But their chief purpose today is to serve as administrative units of the all-powerful central government, with their law enforcement agencies increasingly funded and controlled by Washington.

Gest (who doesn't object in principle to this subversion of the constitutional system) points out that the process through which “local” police became militarized instruments of the central government began in the late 1960s with the advent of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), through which States and cities received “large infusions of federal aid” as part of a supposed effort to “reduce local crime.”

The LEAA was headed by a triumvirate, the composition of which reflected the partisan affiliation of the incumbent president: Under LBJ and Jimmy Carter, it was staffed by two Democrats and a Republican, with that alignment reversing under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.

From its inception, the LEAA encouraged the militarization of police departments (among its first police grants were funds for paramilitary riot suppression gear and the purchase of “Big Bertha” vehicles – tanks modified for inner-city patrols) and plied them with subsidies of every description as a way of redefining their loyalties.

At the same time, the agency also dispensed huge sums “to improve the criminal justice system across the board,” notes Gest. Such “improvements” inevitably made local courts subject to federal control. If judges wanted aid, explained on LEAA triumvir, “they shouldn't be able to dictate the terms and say, `I'm the chief judge of the criminal court, and I'll run my court the way I want to.' Our message was, `Judge, you can't do that anymore.... The system has to improve.' We forced people to work together through the carrot and stick approach.”

People were to “work together” toward what end? Norval Morris, who was nominated serve as an LEAA administrator during the Carter administration, offered a glimpse of one potential destination in a 1969 book called The Honest Politician's Guide to Crime Control, in which he called for a “disarmed populace” -- a universal ban on civilian handgun ownership, and severe limitations even on the use of firearms in hunting.

Many lawmakers on both sides of the aisle regarded the LEAA with suspicion, and by 1979 the agency was mired in well-earned disrepute. Accordingly, it was disbanded, its entire staff banished from government employment, and the concept of federal control over local police was abjured by penitent legislative and executive branch officials in a solemn ceremony of official repudiation.

Yeah, right. And that's William Shatner's real hair.

Like many other parasites, the LEAA reproduced through fission, dividing itself into similiarly self-replicating bureaus within the Justice Department – the most prominent being the Bureau of Justice Assistance -- the ever-helpful agency in charge of handing out largesse in the form of Byrne Grants and other lethal federal subsidies.

Of the more than 800 chair-moisteners “working” at LEAA's Washington office at the time of its formal dissolution in 1982, only 18 suffered the “indignity” of being forced to find relatively honest employment.

The rest of them insinuated themselves into the law enforcement bureaucracy, where they encouraged the metastatic growth of the federal criminal code. They eagerly promoted the Reagan-era escalation in the “War on Drugs,” and enthusiastically backed federally dictated mandatory minimum prison sentences for various trendy offenses. LEAA vets (including Ed Meese) were also heavily involved in promoting the Reagan-era prison-building boom: The Reagan administration spent some $2 billion on prison construction, even as Congress devised increasingly inventive ways to fill them up.

The late 1980s introduced an ominous new trend that could be called “therapeutic law” -- statutes like “hate crimes” laws intended to punish incorrect attitudes, rather than offenses against persons and property. In the early 1990s that trend expanded to include measures like Joe Biden's Violence Against Women Act, under which domestic violence became a federal concern.

All of this followed a path that had been blazed by the LEAA, and more than a few veterans of that agency's spoils system played important roles in both conceiving and implementing those proto-totalitarian measures.

It must never be forgotten that every law carries with it the implicit threat of lethal force; this is particularly true of those enacted by the central government. To reasonable people, 17 such laws is more than half again too many, given that the only Being entitled to dictate laws thought that 10 was quite sufficient.

Under our present system, Americans are burdened with at least 10,000 federal “laws,” most of which they've never heard of. That represents, in principle, at least 10,000 ways to die at the hands of the State's enforcers.

*My thanks to the incomparable Joseph Sobran for bringing this passage to my attention.

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The Real Drug War Kingpins

Not a scene from a movie, or from the streets of Baghdad: "Police" -- that is, Pentagon-equipped and federally-funded occupation troops -- conduct a raid in Detroit.

Mike Nifong's career as the Torquemada of Raleigh, North Carolina is over, although the self-enraptured prosecutor couldn't resist one final lachrymose moment in the spotlight. But Nifong the Good – also known as Nifong the Wise, and Nifong the Misunderstood – deserves some company. He shouldn't be allowed to Bogart that pity pipe.

There are plenty of other corrupt and abusive prosecutors – US Attorneys, State Attorneys General, District Attorneys, and the like -- who deserve to be bathed in the same disrepute, and subject to the same professional ruin, that Nifong must now endure. Andrew Payton Thomas of Phoenix is one. Georgia Attorney General Thurbert Baker, who insists on prolonging the utterly insane imprisonment of Genarlow Wilson, is another.

But today let's focus on the case of John Paschall, one unfathomably vicious little distaff canine.

No photograph of John Paschall is available, so I offer this artist's conception of the prosecutor, seen here "drumming up" drug cases in Robertson County, Texas.

Paschall is District Attorney for Robertson County in Texas, in which capacity he has long been the local Narcotics Kingpin.

No, he doesn't synthesize, sell, or consume the contraband, at least as far as is publicly known.

Paschall is not in charge of drug manufacturing or distribution, but rather what could be called the “fulfillment” department: He heads up the local counter-narcotics task force, which – until quite recently – conducted an annual raid on the local black population in order to produce arrests in sufficient abundance to keep federal Byrne Grant money flowing.

A class-action suit (.pdf) filed against Paschall and the Task Force by the ACLU (insert standard disclaimer here) plausibly alleged that the DA and his associates “have for many years recruited confidential informants, facing criminal charges, by threatening them with extraordinarily lengthy prison terms unless they will implicate numerous named African-American residents in drug sales.... [T]he informant is required to fill a large quota or else he faces lengthy imprisonment.”

Starting in the mid-1980s, the Task Force would conduct an annual raid in Hearne, a Texas town of about 5,000 people. Paschall, according to witness accounts cited in the lawsuit, “publicly and openly joked about the sweeps, saying that it was `time to round up the n*****s,' and laughed about watching African-American residents run in fear during the sweeps. Paschall described the fleeing residents as cockroaches.”

Some of the raids would focus on a housing complex called Columbus Village, a federally subsidized complex housing many black residents. Paschall reportedly expressed the opinion that it would be better for the community if Columbus Village residents “were removed from Hearne by incarceration or other means,” specifically suggesting that the project should be “bombed” and “burned.” But this wouldn't be as profitable as drawing up rosters of Columbus Village residents to be hauled in during the annual paramilitary sweep, so Paschall didn't pull the trigger on his “Destroy Columbus Village to save the town” strategy.

In late 1999, Paschall hauled in a recently paroled petty criminal – a small-time thief with a recurring drug addiction named Derrick Megress -- and blackmailed him into acting as a confidential informant. Paschall had a long history with Megress, and in the following detail of that history we see the unique viciousness that distinguishes Paschall even in the detestable company of Nifong, Thomas, and Baker, the abusive prosecutors mentioned above.

As a juvenile, Megress was hospitalized for serious mental illness, a fact well known to Paschall, who was the one who had the youngster committed. Paschall exploited that vulnerability when the time came to recruit him as an informant, making use of his victim's fears and anxieties: The prosecutor threatened to send Megress to prison for “60 to 99 years,” and to prosecute members of his family who were innocent of any wrongdoing, if the young parolee didn't cooperate. While Megress was incarcerated, some Task Force members allegedly provided additional inducements by beating him regularly and threatening his life.

Megress was specifically required to implicate at least twenty suspects, and would receive a $100 cash payment for each additional name. He was given a tape recorder to document his alleged purchases. He eventually implicated 27 local residents, almost all of whom knew him, and all but one of whom were black. But the only “evidence” offered “that Megress purchased drugs from anyone ... was his own self-serving word,” contends the lawsuit.

In late October and early November, the “sweep” took place as planned, and police detained nearly the entire black population of Hearne. One young man with Down's Syndrome was thrown “onto the ground, handcuffed, and forced ... to lie immobile. They never asked him for his name or identification during his entire detention.” Clifford Runoalds was arrested while on his way to the funeral of his 18-month-old daughter.

Many were arrested and charged with drug dealing despite their ability to provide airtight alibis corroborated with time cards and even security camera footage proving they were at work at the time of the supposed deals.

When the police showed up at the Chelsea Street Pub and Grill in pursuit of Regina Kelly, the young single mother assumed that she was in trouble because of unpaid parking tickets. She went along peacefully, only to learn to her horror that she was accused of narcotics trafficking. She spent two nights in jail, wearing her waitress uniform, on a $70,000 bond. Regina would eventually spend almost a month in jail before the bail was reduced to a sum her mother could afford (she mortgaged her land to pay $1,000 bond).

The indictment “listed Kelly's first name as Jennifer,” notes an account in the Village Voice. That alone should have been sufficient reason to dismiss the case. In addition, “The secret audiotape allegedly incriminating her did not have a single female voice on it. Her prosecution rested on the uncorroborated word of Derrick Megress....”

With no money, no help from distracted court-appointed defenders, and nobody at home to care for her children, Regina's cellmate, another single mother named Erma Faye Stewart, took a deal, pleading guilty to distributing narcotics in a drug-free zone. She received 10 years' probation and was required to pay $1,800 in fines. “Those who refused to take a plea and couldn't post bond, spent five months in prison awaiting trial,” observes a Frontline documentary on the case.

Victims of a "war" against victimless "crimes": Erma Faye Stewat (l.) and Regina Kelly.

About four months after the arrests, the first trial began, and the case disintegrated like cotton candy in an acid bath. Megress was exposed for all to see as a spectacularly worthless witness. So the charges against all of the defendants were dropped – except those who, like Erma Stewart, from whom a plea bargain had been extorted.

Describing Erma's plight three years ago, Frontline reported:

“Three years after she pleaded guilty in order to go home and take care of her children, she is destitute. Because of the plea, she is not eligible for food stamps for herself or federal grant money for education. She can't vote until two years after she completes her 10-year probation. And she has been evicted from her public housing for not paying rent. Her children sleep in various homes and she spends her nights outside the housing project, waiting for the morning when she can go to work as a cook – a job that pays $5.25 an hour. She owes a $1,000 fine, court costs and late probation fees which she says she has been pressured to pay. `They see it like, as long as I have a job, I can pay them.... I already told them, I'm having a hard time, buying my son medicine. I have to have his medicine for his asthma. They don't really care about that. All they want is, you know, the money.'”

That's what this is all about: The money.

Getting a quota of arrests was necessary in order to qualify for continuing Byrne Grants – which are a form of welfare for local police. This meant treating the local federally subsidized housing project as a hunting ground for the usual suspects, and anybody else who looked like a suitable candidate for arrest. And Paschall and his cronies didn't scruple to steal the money honestly earned by one of their victims, even if it meant depriving one of her kids of medicine he needed in order to breathe.

After the Frontline special was broadcast, people from across the country donated over $18,000 to Erma. Unfortunately, she found herself in trouble with her probation officer after she tested positive for marijuana and cocaine use; this means she has a weakness, just like anyone who throws back one or a dozen brewskis too many. (If she's been spending some of her meager earnings on drugs while her asthmatic son goes without medicine, Erma's got some serious problems that only God can fix.) But she wasn't convicted of mere possession; she was forced to plead guilty to first-degree felony distribution, a charge for which no evidence was ever produced.

Oh, and Paschall, always the quintessence of class, offered this reaction regarding the humanitarian outpouring toward Erma: "She can get on TV and she can cry all she wants to, but she’s her own worst enemy because she continues using drugs. She’s going to have to get her act clean or suffer the consequences — TV show or not.”

Paschall, of course, is just the person to lecture others about accepting the "consequences" of their actions.

The lawsuit against him was settled in 2005. The terms of that settlement are confidential, but probably fairly lucrative to the ACLU (which does quite well for itself in cases of this sort – another issue I have with the “war on drugs”: It helps subsidize the ACLU, which has never gotten out of the business of brow-beating local communities over traditional religious displays and other cultural conventions the organization doesn't like).

Of course, before agreeing to a settlement, Paschall filed a motion asserting – I am not making this up – three different kinds of immunity: “prosecutorial immunity,” “qualified immunity,” and “official immunity.” US District Judge Walter S. Smith Jr. rejected all of Paschall's claims with the same thoughtless ease Tim Duncan would display in stuffing my flat-footed “jump” shot. This no doubt explains Paschall's eagerness to settle the case.

And yet – there he sits, still clothed in whatever dignity and prestige his office confers upon him, while the victims of his corrupt ambition do what they can to keep body and soul, and families, together.

Video Extra

Regina Kelly recounts her experience to Radley Balko, senior editor for Reason magazine:



Former Texas counter-narcotics police officer Barry Cooper describes how police become addicted to the "war on drugs"; no, seriously:




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