Monopoly "Money "

"Everyone knows that the State claims and exercises [a] monopoly of crime ... and that it makes this monopoly as strict as it can. It forbids private murder, but itself organizes murder on a colossal scale. It punishes private theft, but itself lays unscrupulous hands on anything it wants, whether the property of citizen or alien." --

Albert Jay Nock, reducing the matter to its undeniable essentials, in his indispensable work Our Enemy, The State.



One of the most enduring tidbits of economic pseudepigrapha is this incontestable statement dubiously attributed to Ludwig von Mises: "Government is the only institution that can take a valuable commodity like paper and make it worthless by applying ink." The same principle holds true with respect to the debasement of the official coinage.


Owing to the Regime's relentless debasement of the dollar, pennies and nickels are actually worth more as metal than as U.S. currency. In late 2006, the United States Mint -- an agency with no legislative authority -- issued a rule forbidding people, on pain of imprisonment, to make economically sensible use of coined "money" they had earned through legitimate commerce.


Americans who possessed large quantities of pennies and nickels were informed that it was a federal offense punishable by a $10,000 fine or five years in prison to melt them down and extract the marketable metals from those government-issued slugs.



This is a "crime"? Three pennies, one of them a pre-1983 97% copper coin, were melted in a science experiment intended to separate the zinc from the copper. According to the U.S. Mint, this was a federal offense.

The same penalties apply to Americans who travel abroad with more than $5 worth of the coins in their possession, or ship more than $100 in pennies and/or nickels out of the country (for purposes deemed "legitimate" by the criminal syndicate headquartered in Washington, D.C.).


Those penalties, which were imposed Soviet-style by way bureaucratic ukase, rather than legislative action, are a portent of much more draconian currency controls to come.


In a recent interview, economic analyst Doug Casey addressed what he calls "the grim reality of impending currency controls" -- that is, punitive measures imposed by the Regime to prevent Americans from moving their money abroad in order to protect it from official theft through direct taxation and the more subtle pilferage called inflation.


"I don't know what form the exchange controls are going to take, but there are two general possibilities: regulation and taxation," observed Casey. "The regulations might take the form of a rule prohibiting you from taking more than X-thousands of dollars abroad per year without special permission. No expensive vacations, no foreign asset purchases without state approval."


Such Foreign Exchange (FX) controls "have been used since the days of the Roman Empire," Casey continues. "A country debases its currency, raises taxes beyond a certain level, and makes regulations too onerous -- and productive people naturally react by getting their capital, and then themselves, out of Dodge. But the government can't have that, so it puts on FX controls. They're almost inevitable at this point."


Shortly before the Soviet empire collapsed, its ruling elite imposed the death penalty for violations of its currency exchange laws, Casey recalls. It's not impossible to imagine a similar state of affairs taking hold as Washington's globe-straddling collectivist Empire implodes. It shouldn't be forgotten, of course, that every government imposition on the rights and property of the individual is a contingent death sentence for those who dare defend themselves against the State's criminal aggression.



Redeemable in real money: A 100,000 gold certificate of the kind used in "sovereign" transactions before Washington closed the "gold window."








Casey's analysis is sound, but he is insufficiently alarmist. The regulations put in place by the U.S. Mint in early 2006 are currency controls of exactly the kind he describes -- a fact noted in the title of the agency's news release announcing the final version of the restrictions ("United States Mint Limits Exportation and Minting of Coins," April 17, 2007). In keeping with the kleptomaniacal impulses that characterize every public policy inflicted on us by Washington, the Mint announced that coins that were melted or exported in violation of its rule would be "forfeited" -- that is, stolen -- on behalf of the Regime.


As Casey pointed out, the Regime will promote FX controls by depicting those who seek to protect their earnings as "unpatriotic," and demonizing those who try to get their money out of the USSA as greedy, unscrupulous enemies of The People -- "wreckers," to use the appropriate Stalinist epithet.


It's difficult to depict people who melt down pennies and nickels as Plutocrats. However, the Mint did make a feint in the direction of faux patriotism by denouncing those "few individuals" who would extract valuable metal from state-issued slugs as selfish clods determined to "take advantage of the taxpayer."


Never forget: In the collectivist lexicon, the adjectives "greedy" and "selfish" apply only to those who wish to keep what they have honestly earned, rather than to those who wish to steal that property through the use of officially sanctioned criminal means.


Individuals who wish to melt down coins they have legitimately earned -- coins that are their property to be used as the owners see fit -- face kidnapping and imprisonment at the hands of the same government that tirelessly steals the value of the same currency in order to serve the interests of the parasite class. And now the same Regime appears to be poised to "solve" this problem by removing every vestige of value from its coinage.


The Obama Junta's FY 2011 budget contains a provision incorporating the so-called "Coin Modernization and Taxpayer Savings Act," which was first proposed two years ago. The purpose of that measure -- which would effectively repeal Art. I, section 8, line five of the United States Constitution -- is to authorize the Treasury Department to develop and use "new metallic content for circulating coins...." This is necessary, according to the bill, because "international demand along with market speculation for commodity metals has, over the past several years, increased the cost of producing circulating coins in the United States...."


That statement is a reeking pile of unfiltered Bolshevik: The costs and market value of copper, zinc, and nickel appear to be going up because the dollar -- under the pressure of Washington's incontinent profligacy -- is losing its purchasing power. This is why minting pennies currently costs 1.62 cents a copy, and the unit cost of forging a nickel is nearly six cents.


The "solution" to this, of course, is to permit the Secretary of the Treasury -- the charming fellow presiding over the redistribution of what remains of our aggregate personal wealth into the hands of Wall Street's corporatist criminal elite -- to issue new government-approved slugs made entirely of trash metal, which we will be compelled by "law" to use as currency.

Sometimes it's just that obvious: Notice of FDR's 1933 executive order demanding that Americans surrender their gold to the regime. Westbrook Pegler was exactly right.

While Washington prepares for the terminal debasement of its currency, the rulers within its seraglio of collectivist soviets (sometimes amusingly referred to as "states") are contemplating currency exchange restrictions of their own.


The government afflicting the otherwise lovely state of Washington, for example, is considering the imposition of a sales tax on gold and silver coins and bullion. This amounts to a government-inflicted surcharge on a currency transaction. It would also punish those who choose to invest in gold and silver rather than the stock market.


While sensible people (including a few relatively decent legislators) in the Evergreen State have thrown up impediments to the proposed currency exchange tax, the state legislature is pursuing a similar end through indirect means: The state's Department of Revenue seeks an increase in the business-and-occupation tax paid by bullion dealers.


This tax penalty wouldn't apply to people who throw away their money in the stock market, as the architects of our corporate socialist system would prefer. It would likely drive business to dealers in other states not foolish enough to impose such liabilities on coin and bullion dealers -- until similar penalties are imposed on currency exchanges by the tax-consumers in other states, of course.


There is no reason rooted in logic, history, or the Constitution for the government to retain its monopoly on issuing currency. For most of America's history prior to the advent of the Federal Reserve (aka the Focus of Evil in the Modern World), there were no legal tender laws requiring the use of government-issued currency. The constitutional provision referring to the power to "coin" money refers to standardizing the weight and purity of currency made from real money -- that is, gold and silver (or even, if the market approves, copper).


Representative Ron Paul (R-Constitution) has proposed a measure that entitled the "Free Competition in Currency Act" that would repeal the legal tender laws that created the Regime's monopoly on the issuance of currency. Section 3 of that bill would impose a nation-wide ban on taxing "the sale, exchange, or other disposition" of coins, bullion, or any other monetary instrument used in free commerce.


Rep. Paul's freedom in currency act is an organic and necessary compliment to his bill to audit the Federal Reserve System (as a first step toward abolishing that engine of fraud and mass bloodshed). Since ruling elites do not consent to being deposed by legislative means, it's impossible for me to believe that either of those bills will ever be enacted. But they may provide useful guidance when -- not "if" -- the current system collapses under the insupportable weight of its accumulated corruption.


Be sure to tune in for Pro Libertate Radio each weeknight from 7:00-8:00 Central Time on the Liberty News Radio Network.

Dum spiro, pugno!

Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Don't Think Things Through

During the so-called McCarthy Era, Frank Chodorov -- an Old Right individualist of the Jeffersonian school -- offered a simple and effective solution to the problem presented by Communist infiltration of various federal agencies: "The only thing to do, if you want to rid the bureaucracy of Communists, is to abolish the bureaucracy."



Despite -- or perhaps because of -- the fact that this prescription would have worked perfectly, it has been resisted by most conservatives, from that era until the present, who have seen nothing wrong with expanding the power and reach of government agencies as long as they were in the "right" hands.


Statist conservatives rarely if ever advocate "the dismantling of the public trough at which these [Communist-aligned] bureaucrats feed," Chodorov pointed out, because "[t]hey too worship Power."



Like the properly despised Communists, the conservatives described by Chodorov subscribe to Lenin's dictum that the central political question is "who does what to whom." This is why Chodorov referred to the various counter-subversion investigations as "heresy trials" in which the question "Are you or were you a member of the Communist Party?" actually "turns out to mean, have you aligned yourself with the Moscow branch of the church?"



Chodorov's insights come irresistibly to mind as I read and listen to conservative jeremiads over the impending end of the Pentagon's "Don't Ask - Don't Tell" policy regarding military service by homosexuals.


Since the constitutional confederacy we supposedly inherited is not supposed to be burdened with a standing army, why are we even discussing the question of whether homosexuals should be permitted to serve in the same?


The kernel of Chodorov's insight, it seems to me, is this: Conservatives tend to bemoan what is being done to various federal agencies when they should focus instead on whether they should exist in the first place. It's for this reason that conservatives are scandalized over what the Gay Lobby wants to do to the military, when the real outrage is what is being done with it -- or whether that immense, costly, and destructive federal bureaucracy should exist, at least in its current form.


Typical of the misguided approach taken by statist conservatives are the following exceptionally wrong-headed comments offered by a reliably foolish commentator:



"Would a parent possessing fundamental morals and religious values stand by and allow a son or daughter to enlist in today’s military? The answer is no and, because of the situation that already exists [meaning, presumably, the acceptance of homosexual enlistees under "Don't Ask, Don't Tell"], the military is being denied a source of the type recruit that all services want and that have always regularly been filled in the past."



A more cogent formulation would be the following:


Given that the U.S. military -- an instrument of mass destruction controlled by the imperial clique ruling our country -- has become a greater force for evil than the Red Army was in its prime, what parent possessing a scintilla of common sense and even a particle of moral wisdom would permit his child to enlist?


Would the lives of children brought up in homes defined by "fundamental morals and religious values" somehow be incomplete if they were deprived of the opportunity to kill and tyrannize the hapless residents of countries that have done ours no harm?


Like many other conservative pundits, the fellow quoted above suggests that integrating open homosexuals into the military would defile an otherwise morally upright -- nay, sanctified -- institution. Since that gentleman served in the Marines, he's aware of the fact that the military is not composed of people who have taken vows of celibacy and otherwise committed themselves to lives of pristine self-abnegation. That's one a reason why practitioners of the world's oldest profession are often known as "camp followers."



There are much worthier pursuits for capable, idealistic children brought up in Christian homes. Serving people abroad as a missionary on behalf of the Gospel (as distinct from promoting the interests of various ecclesio-Leninist corporations called "churches") is an option that offers considerable opportunities for adventure untainted by bloodguilt.



Furthermore, capable young men who choose to become missionaries rather than armed enforcers in the employ of the Power Elite don't run the risk of being required to do terrible things -- only to find themselves being prosecuted by the war criminals who cut their orders. (By way of an infuriating example of how this works, I cite the case of Evan Vela Carnahan, the step-son of a good friend of mine from High School.)


People in the business of killing, we're told, are permitted to "blow off some steam" by indulging in behaviors that might seem a little off-putting to people who espouse "fundamental morals and religious values."


In his 1975 book Twilight of Authority, The late Robert Nisbet, an authentic conservative of the non-statist variety, wrote that there is "a good deal in common psychologically" between the kind of soldier who earns various battlefield commendations "and the kind of individual we label psychopath in civil life." Through the practice of "licensed violence" the military transmutes criminal behavior into "heroism."


"But there is a different kind of licensed immorality that comes with war, and that has still wider appeal inasmuch as it exists on the home front as well as in garrison and on the battlefield," continued Nisbet. "I refer to the whole area of sexual conduct.... It was under the steady impact of the Roman Republic's wars, first foreign, then civil as well as foreign, that the destruction of the Roman family system gradually began.... The great wave of immorality that hit Roman society in the first century B.C., so well attested to by contemporary essayists, and that the Emperor Augustus strove valiantly to terminate through laws and decrees, had its origins in war."


"What is in the first instance licensed, as it were, by war stays on to develop into forms which have their own momentum," he concludes.



He's an authentic conservative, which means that he's a critic of the military: Dr. Allan Carlson, president of the Howard Center on the Family.


Rather than encouraging their children to enlist in the military, parents concerned about preserving traditional morality should do everything they can to minimize their children's exposure to the institution.


As Dr. Allan Carlson of the Howard Center points out, the United States military could be considered the single greatest source of cultural subversion in American society. It is, in his phrase, "an engine of social change," including radical alterations of conventional mores and the structure of the traditional family.


Dr. Carlson observes that between 1941 and 1972, "over half of all American males served in the active-duty armed forces" -- an unprecedented state of affairs. During that same period, the state grew immeasurably in terms of both size and intrusiveness, and the "fundamental morals and religious values" of American society came under relentless attack. Carlson makes a compelling case that these developments are intimately related.



"When one examines the military's role in stimulating government action or innovations that later become institutionalized, the effect of war in driving social revolution grows evident," maintains Dr. Carlson. U.S. involvement in World Wars I and II did a great deal to foment the Sexual Revolution. Writing in 1993, Carlson described "Don't Ask -- Don't Tell" -- "Bill Clinton's contemporary efforts to use [the military] for a new kind of experimentation" -- as merely the latest manifestation of ongoing institutional efforts by the military to undermine the conventional family structure.



It is the military's usefulness as an engine of compelled cultural change that has long made it an attractive target for those who follow Antonio Gramsci's design for social revolution.



Since he died long before Gramsci was born, James Madison wasn't familiar with that revolutionary theorist's concept of the "war of position" and the use Gramsci's disciples would make of a large, lavishly funded standing military. Had he been given foresight to anticipate this particular use of the military, Madison most likely would have added it to his justly famous indictment of the warfare state as the most fearful enemy of liberty.


In addition to undermining the corporate morality of an entity charitably described as amoral, homosexual integration of the military would promote "the acceptance of other fundamental departures from military discipline and the proper function of the military," complains the conservative commentator cited above. "Moral relativism, a feature of homosexuality, spawns the attitude that all military orders and practices are relative and not to be acted upon swiftly or carried out without question." (Emphasis added.)


Does he really mean to suggest that "all military orders" are "to be acted upon swiftly [and] carried out without question"?


Is it his opinion that permitting homosexuals to serve openly in the military would undermine the institutional discipline needed to continue fighting undeclared, illegal wars of aggression abroad?


Would homosexuals infect the military with a virulent strain of "moral relativism" that would make it less effective as an instrument of domestic regimentation if and when outright martial law descends upon our country?


Are we to fear that the end of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" would hinder military efforts to confiscate civilian firearms here, employing methods that have been used (with varying levels of success) during occupations of Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and other countries?


Should we strive to make sure that the ranks of military torturers are kept free of homosexuals, lest their valuable work become morally suspect?


This second objection focuses, once again, on what is done to, rather than by, the military. But this one is even more pernicious in that it is rooted in defense of an indefensible moral assumption -- a variant on the discredited "Nuremberg Defense."


Were he with us today (and his absence is keenly felt) Frank Chodorov might point out that militarist conservatives and their leftist counterparts champion a monolithic military establishment because they all worship power. A military that acts in strict obedience to constituted authority is more susceptible to top-down subversion.


It is precisely the tendency of military personnel to act on orders swiftly and without question that makes the military so attractive to those who wish to reconfigure American society. And as Nisbet pointed out, it's hardly a coincidence that the cultural onslaught against conventional morality has escalated dramatically since U.S. involvement in the two world wars and the creation of the National Security State in 1947.


Traditionalists are understandably concerned about the damage that results when the military becomes a tool of radical social engineering. But they are so bewitched by appeals to nationalist and jingoist impulses that they fail to see the central role of the military establishment in fomenting the social changes they deplore. This isn't a problem we would be dealing with if we didn't have an immense standing military with a global license to meddle and an increasingly visible role in domestic policing.


Given all of this, we really should apply the Chodorov Principle: Rather than trying to sanitize an armed bureaucracy that really shouldn't exist, why don't we abolish it?

Dum spiro, pugno!

This Is A Man: The Defiance of Omar Deghayes

Blinded, bloodied, but unbowed: Libyan-born British citizen Omar Deghayes, imprisoned and tortured for years at Gitmo, seen here shortly before his release.


"What stuck in the minds of these men who had become murderers was simply the notion of being involved in something historic, grandiose, unique ("a great task that occurs once in two thousand years"), which must therefore be difficult to bear. This was important, because the murderers were not sadists or killers by nature; on the contrary, a systematic effort was made to weed out all those who derived physical pleasure from what they did....


Hence the problem was how to overcome not so much their conscience as the animal pity by which all normal men are affected in the presence of physical suffering. The trick used by Himmler — who apparently was rather strongly afflicted by these instinctive reactions himself — was very simple and probably very effective; it consisted in turning these instincts around, as it were, in directing them toward the self. So that instead of saying: What horrible things I did to people!, the murderers would be able to say: What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders!" --

Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem


"The prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay during the war on terror have attacked their military guards hundreds of times.... [One] detainee `reached under the face mask of an IRF (Initial Reaction Force) team member's helmet and scratched his face, attempting to gouge his eyes,' states a May 27, 2005, report on an effort to remove a recalcitrant prisoner from his cell. `The IRF team member received scratches to his face and eye socket area,' the [Pentagon] report said. " --

Associated Press, July 31, 2006


Omar Deghayes had no face mask when he was bound in chains and buried beneath a scrum of armored guards. Pinned down and unable to flee or protect himself, Deghayes felt a pair of fingers probe into his eye sockets.



As the assailant, his fingers forged by sadistic purpose into implements of mutilation, tore and gouged at his eyes, Deghayes suppressed the scream that was gathering in his throat out of determination not to concede anything to his tormentors.



While Deghayes resisted in silence, the officer presiding over the torture commanded his underling to press harder. The victim was determined to resist; his jailers were determined to break him. Deghayes won that battle, but it cost him the sight in his right eye.



Today, following more than six years of constant degradation and torture in the Caribbean gulag described by the flagitious gasbag Rush Limbaugh as "Club Gitmo," Deghayes is permanently disfigured. His useless eye is permanently shut and his nose, broken through repeated beatings, is visibly scarred and noticeably skewed to his right.



Omar's hideous wounds are tokens of honor attesting to his victory in what was truly a holy war against the world's most powerful terrorist syndicate, the United States Government.



"A lot of the things in his character seem to have deepened, like rebellion and resistance and not accepting oppression," comments Omar's brother Abubaker in describing the changes wrought by six years of imprisonment and abuse. "I think they became more rooted in him rather than being beaten out of him."


The seeds of Omar's admirably defiant personality were probably planted by the example of his father, a Libyan attorney who distinguished himself as an enemy of Gaddhafi's regime and was murdered by the dictator's secret police as a result. At one point, Libyan and American intelligence agents engaged in a bidding war to buy Deghayes from the bounty hunters who had captured him. It's difficult to imagine that Omar's suffering would have been much worse had the Libyans won that auction.

This is a man: Omar Deghayes, survivor of Washington's Cuban gulag.

Several years ago, the Landmark Legal Foundation, a litigation firm headed by the deranged rant-radio personality Mark Levin, filed a Freedom of Information Act request to compel the Pentagon to release a report on alleged abuses committed at Gitmo.



The "abuses" in question were supposedly committed by the detainees against the guards. "Lawyers for the detainees have done a great job painting their clients as innocent victims of U.S. abuse when the fact is that these detainees, as a group, are barbaric and extremely dangerous," insisted Levin. "They are using their terrorist training on the battlefield to abuse our guards and manipulate our Congress and our court system." (Emphasis added.)


Levin, a person to and from whom lies come easily (imagine a genetic hybrid of Joseph Goebbels and Lazar Kaganovich, and you've got Levin), was lying. Fewer than ten percent of those detained at Gitmo had any plausibly alleged connection to terrorism of any kind, much less extensive battlefield training in the tactics of asymmetrical warfare.


As a group, the detainees were innocent men who had been kidnapped, imprisoned, and abused for years without any prospect of relief. It is hardly surprising that people in such circumstances would become violent and desperate. Nor should it come as a shock to us that at least some of those who had no proven terrorist affiliations before being sent to Gitmo declared war on the government that had abused them once they were released. Deghayes was among the Gitmo detainees who "attacked" their armed captors in any way they could. He was not a violent or vulgar man by disposition.


Prior to being scooped up by Pakistani bounty hunters and sold to the U.S. government, Deghayes had been a peaceful, unassuming man, an entrepreneur who was devoted to his religion and studying to become a lawyer.


He had done nothing to merit his imprisonment, let alone the constant, dehumanizing mistreatment he suffered from the moment he was stuffed, hooded and shackled, into a military transport plane bound for the former Soviet air base in Bagram, Afghanistan, where he was imprisoned before being sent to Gitmo.


The partial blinding he suffered -- he never regained the vision in his right eye -- was retaliation for his persistent defiance. When guards would assault him, Deghayes would fight back -- as hard as he could, however he could, for as long as he could. When they pumped pepper spray into his cell by way of the "bean-hole," Deghayes would claw at their hands and then counter-attack as viciously as he could when reaction team would swarm him in response.



On the day he was blinded, Deghayes was one of several detainees who refused to surrender their pants. "Being humiliated by getting beaten up is better than giving your own trousers out," he explained later. "If I'd done those things" -- that is, meekly complied with whatever calculated humiliation his captors chose to inflict on him -- "I would've been really bitter now. I'm probably less bitter than anyone else because I know I gave them a really hard time."


Omar actually displays an astonishing empathy for the guards who tormented him. As he describes them, they were victims of a cult-like regime of information management and milieu control.


In precisely the fashion described by Hannah Arendt, the guards were subject to relentless ritual indoctrination intended to emphasize their "historic, grandiose, unique" role in a world-historic conflict, and encouraged to invert their pity from their victims to themselves. Deghayes expresses something akin to pity for those who imprisoned him: They willingly surrendered something they weren't able to beat out of him.

***



***

(Go to part 2 here.)


Brandon Neely, who served as a prison guard at Gitmo, recalls how he and his comrades were marinated in hatred and permitted to indulge their sadistic impulses at the expense of the helpless men imprisoned there.


To understand the depth of the indoctrination and the potency of the hatred instilled in the guards it's useful to consider the case of Sean Baker, an Army Specialist who was nearly beaten to death by his comrades during an IRF training drill.


Baker, clad in the same orange jumpsuit worn by detainees, was dragged from the cell by an IRF "extraction team." He had been given a "safety word" -- "red" -- to use if the drill became too intense. He desperately spat out that "safety word" as his head was repeatedly slammed against the stainless steel floor while one of his assailants tried to suffocate him.


Despite the fact that all "extractions" were videotaped, the record of this incident -- conveniently, and predictably -- disappeared.


After it was finally established that Baker was one of "us" rather than "them," Baker was flown to the Portsmouth Naval Medical Center in Virginia, where he was diagnosed with a severe concussion. For years after the experience, Baker suffered from seizures as a result of a beating he'd received at the hands of his colleagues -- people conditioned to treat their victims as untermenschen.



While Brandon Neely escaped the kind of physical trauma that now blights Sean Baker's life, he is invisibly scarred by the memory of the things he was ordered and permitted to do to helpless human beings.


"The stuff I did and the stuff I saw was just wrong," Neely told the AP a year ago, when it was assumed -- incorrectly -- that the Obama administration would be closing down Gitmo within a year. Most of the guards were in or just out of their teenage years, brimming with post-adolescent aggression and suffused with a faux-patriotic desire to avenge 9/11 by beating or otherwise molesting any Muslim on which they could lay their hands.


The guards were told that the confused, terrified men who came stumbling out of military transport planes with hoods over their heads and hands and feet in shackles were "the worst terrorists in the world," Neely recalls, and they were given permission -- usually oblique, sometimes explicit -- to treat them any way that seemed fit.


On his first day of guard duty, Neely was escorting a prisoner to a cell when the elderly man balked. Neely responded to this faint gesture of resistance by shoving the shackled man face-first into the ground. Each time the terrified man tried to get to his feet, Neely slammed him back to the floor. Eventually the prisoner was hog-tied and left immobilized for several hours in direct sunlight.


At the time, thanks to the indoctrination he'd received, Neely was convinced that the prisoner was using his "terrorist training" to attack him. He later learned that the old man had put up what feeble resistance he could out of the belief that he was facing immediate execution. For Commissar Levin, the take-away from this incident would be that Neely was among the "heroic" guards who had been assaulted by a prisoner. Neely, who is now a law enforcement officer (a career path being pursued by many former Gitmo personnel -- contemplate that fact for a second), obviously knows better.


A few months ago, Neely traveled to England to seek reconciliation with two former Gitmo detainees, Ruhal Ahmed and Shafiq Rasul. The meeting was arranged by way of Rasul's Facebook page.


Ahmed and Rasul were not terrorists of any kind; they had gone to Afghanistan on a recreational tour that could be referred to as "A Passage to Bangkok" (they were indulging in the "fragrance of Afghanistan," as it were). Despite having more in common with Cheech and Chong or Harold and Kumar than Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, the duo was corralled by the Northern Alliance and sold into American custody.


Brandon's intent was to apologize for his complicity in the crimes committed at Gitmo. His victims -- displaying the virtue forgiveness that is a central tenet of Christianity, even if it is alien to the teachings of contemporary Ecclesio-Leninists -- treated him with kindness, forebearance, and friendship.

***

***

Neely grew up in a multi-generational military family in Texas. After his duty in Guantanamo he served in Iraq. As any honest person would, he eventually recognized that the occupation of that country is illegal, immoral, and unsupportable. To his considerable credit, he refused to return to active duty in 2007 when his Individual Ready Reserve unit was called up for another deployment to Iraq.


Just as commendable is Neely's refusal to be bound by the unenforceable non-disclosure document he was compelled to sign before leaving Guantanamo. That document has the same legal and moral authority possessed by similar confidentiality oaths taken by members of other criminal cliques, but it has successfully intimidated other former Gitmo guards into silence.


As a younger man, Brandon Neely allowed himself to be transmuted into an instrument of State-sanctioned criminal violence. By making amends to some of the innocent people he helped to brutalize, Neely is reclaiming his individual humanity. That is something Omar Deghayes, for all he suffered at the hands of Neely's comrades, never surrendered.


Be sure to catch Pro Libertate Radio each weeknight from 7:00-8:00 Central Time on the Liberty News Radio Network.

Dum spiro, pugno!