Scratch a "Liberal," find a Fascist: The Case of Barbara Boxer

Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer of California, a bottomless fountain of foolishness, has proposed a measure that would permit governors to deploy National Guard troops to provide "security" at government-run schools. 

“Is it not part of the national defense to make sure that your children are safe?” Boxer asked during a Capitol Hill press conference in the misguided belief that this content-free trope somehow constituted compelling wisdom. 

She blithely stated that her proposal wouldn’t be a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act (which was supposed to prevent the domestic use of the military for the purpose of law enforcement) because it would allow governors to re-purpose troops who are already being used for drug interdiction operations. That is to say, the militarization of schools wouldn’t constitute a new Posse Comitatus violation, but rather expand on an existing one. 

Boxer’s proposal to militarize the schools could have been taken directly from "The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012,” a terrifyingly prescient essay published twenty years ago in Parameters, the journal of the U.S. Army War College by military historian Charles J. Dunlap. This glimpse of a dystopian future takes the form of a long letter written by an officer awaiting execution as a traitor to the junta that has seized control over the United States in the wake of military disasters abroad and socio-economic turmoil at home.

"It wasn't any single cause that led us to this point," writes the condemned patriot to a friend. "It was instead a combination of several different developments, the beginnings of which were evident in 1992.” Rather than de-mobilizing at the end of the Cold War, the ruling establishment expanded the military’s mission overseas and made it an even more pervasive presence at home.

Military personnel became "an adjunct to all police forces in the country," the officer recalls; social and economic problems were redefined as "national security" issues and brought under the military's area of responsibility. This is how uniformed military personnel became ubiquitous: People became accustomed to the sight of "uniformed military personnel patrolling their neighborhood.... Even the youngest citizens were co-opted.... [We have] an entire generation of young people who have grown up comfortable with the sight of military personnel patrolling their streets and teaching in their classrooms."

There is a sense in which Boxer’s proposal is redundant, since armed “warriors” are already deployed in countless schools nation-wide: They are called “resource officers,” but they are taught to perceive themselves as front-line troops on a combat footing.

 "You've got to be a one-man fighting force,” self-styled counter-terrorism “expert” John Giduck exhorted police officers at the 2007 National Conference of School Resource Officers in Orlando, Florida. “You've got to have enough guns, and ammunition and body armor to stay alive.... You should be walking around in schools every day in complete tactical equipment, with semi-automatic weapons.... You can no longer afford to think of yourselves as peace officers.... You must think of yourself [sic] as soldiers in a war because we're going to ask you to act like soldiers." (Emphasis added.)

“Resource Officers” are not present for the protection of children; their mission is to intimidate them, and – with increasing frequency – make criminals out of them. A detailed story published by The Guardian of London points out that in 2010, police deployed in public schools issued roughly 300,000 “class C misdemeanor” citations to school children, most of them for trivial disruptive behavior, such as “inappropriate” dress and excessive use of perfume. Those infractions can result in fines, community service, or even time behind bars – and an arrest record that can ruin the student’s future educational and employment prospects. This is a splendid illustration of the “school-to-prison pipeline” in operation.

Although horrific mass shootings like the one at Sandy Hook Elementary School are vanishingly rare, “lock-down” drills in which SWAT teams conduct training exercises involving hostage or terrorism scenarios are increasingly commonplace. Many of those “hostage rescue" drills are better described as hostage-taking exercises, since they are used as pretexts for warrantless searches of lockers and student property. 

Child-killer poses with Sandy Hook Survivors.

 Vista Grande High School in Casa Grande, Arizona, held a lock-down drug sweep on October 31. As had happened before in other schools across the country, the students were confined to their classrooms, then led in small groups to another room where they were forced to line up against a wall and be searched with the help of drug-sniffing dogs. 

This exercise introduced a new element: Among the four law enforcement agencies involved in the search was a group of prison guards employed by the Corrections Corporation of America, the nation’s largest for-profit prison contractor.

Notes Caroline Isaacs of the Tucson office of the American Friends Service Committee: “To invite for-profit prison guards to conduct law enforcement actions in a high school is perhaps the most direct expression of the `schools-to-prison pipeline’ I’ve ever seen.” Clearly, the similarities between government-run schools and prisons are not limited to architecture. Posting National Guard troops around government indoctrination centers, as Boxer proposes, would destroy any residual pretense that there is a material distinction between "schools" and "prisons" in what is becoming an undisguised garrison state.

Like most contemporary liberals, Boxer is a passionate militarist who swaddles her enthusiasm for lethal force in rhetoric about compassion and equality. She can call for armed troops to patrol “gun-free” school zones without perceiving any contradiction, because she simply assumes that the rest of us exist only to serve the interests of the political class and its enforcement arm. It is their privilege to compel, and our duty to submit to whatever they choose to inflict upon us. This is what Boxer and her comrades have in mind when they invoke “national security.” 

 

Dum spiro, pugno!

Sandy Hook Massacre: Sympathy from the Devil

“They had their entire lives ahead of them -- birthdays, graduations, weddings, kids of their own,” intoned the murderer of 16-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki as he began the liturgy of official mourning for the victims of the Newtown massacre. 

Every time children die in an outbreak of violence, “I react not as a president, but as anybody else would as a parent,” continued the head of a regime that will not explain to Nasser al-Awlaki why his son Anwar and grandson Abdulrahman – both of the U.S. citizens – were murdered by presidential decree. 

“We’ve endured too many of these tragedies in the past few years,” insisted the official who has presided over dozens of lethal drone attacks in Pakistan and other countries with whom the U.S. is not formally at war. 

Tears welled up in Obama’s eyes as he pronounced the familiar, facile phrases of selective sympathy. After ordering that U.S. flags be flown at half-staff for a week, Obama said that he and his wife would hug their children a little closer tonight as he empathizes with the parents whose children were murdered in Newtown. 

It’s doubtful that he was moved to similar thoughts of vicarious bereavement as he contemplated the parents in Pakistan, Yemen, and Afghanistan who have been left childless because of his actions.

Shortly after the police had arrived at Sandy Hook Elementary School to offer the service they always provide in such circumstances – that is, drawing chalk outlines and stringing up crime-scene tape – Mr. Obama was informed of the massacre. The minion who conveyed that news to the Child Killer-in-Chief was National Security Adviser John Brennan, who is the official Keeper of the “Kill List” – the roster of people, including U.S. citizens, who have been targeted for summary execution by a secretive executive branch committee. 

Last April, in response to modest but growing public outrage over the Obama Regime’s use of killer drones, Brennan gave an opaque and self-congratulatory speech insisting that the program was legal because those who preside over it consider it to be. 

Killing distant, unarmed people by way of robot-delivered missiles is “legal, ethical, and wise,” he declared. The targeted execution of individuals deemed to be terrorists –without the benefit of trial or any simulacrum of due process – is the result of careful “deliberation,” and conducted in a way that discriminates between combatants and bystanders.

This must mean that Barack Obama and the people who are sufficiently foolish and depraved to obey his orders intended to kill 16-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki while he was enjoying a backyard barbecue at the home of a family friend in Yemen. 

The Regime has never explained why it murdered that child, let alone apologized to the family for doing so. The closest it has come to an explanation was offered last September by former White House spokesliar (and campaign functionary) Robert Gibbs, who actually claimed that the teenager’s death was his own fault because he had somehow made a poor choice of fathers: “I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they’re truly concerned about the well-being of their children.”

By default, this is the Obama Regime’s official rationale for murdering an innocent 16-year-old U.S. citizen. How does the logic – such as it is – of Gibbs’s answer differ from whatever rationale drove a maniac to open fire on a kindergarten class in Connecticut? Assuming that the shooter was deranged, he at least had the excuse of insanity. 

Obama, Brennan, Gibbs and their allies, by way of contrast, all profess to be entirely sane. The same is true of Time magazine contributor – and prominent Obama supporter – Joe Klein. Late in the last campaign Klein used an MSNBC panel discussion to offer a stout defense of Obama’s drone strikes, even as he admitted that innocent bystanders – including 4-year-olds – are frequently killed by them. The only concern, Klein insisted, was the possibility that the power to conduct remote killings may find itself in the hands of someone less enlightened than Obama.

For the Obama Regime, child-killing is an instrument of policy. This was made clear in a recent story reported by the Military Times describing how U.S. troops in Afghanistan, fearful over the actions of a group of young men nearby called in an airstrike that killed all of the suspected guerillas – only to find out later that three of them were children, aged 8, 10, and 12. The families of the dead children said that they had been gathering dried animal leavings, which are used as fuel.

The International Security Assistance Force in Kabul issued a statement acknowledging that the airstrike “accidentally killed three innocent Afghan children.” That statement prompted Army Lt. Col. Marion Carrington to tell the Military Times that the children may not have been innocent.

According to Carrington, whose unit is training Afghan police, “In addition to looking for military-age males, [we are] looking for children with potential hostile intent.” Since hostility is the natural, and entirely commendable, reaction to foreign occupiers, Carrington is saying that any Afghan child with sufficient awareness to resent the occupation is a legitimate military target.

What Adam Lanza did once in a fit of murderous irrationality, the Regime over which Obama presides does practically every day – and the killing is carried out by people who act with clear-eyed, clinical indifference to the suffering they inflict. 

Admittedly, that comparison is unfair, since Lanza didn’t have the means to carry out an Obama-style “double-tap” strike: It is the established practice of the CIA to follow up a drone-launched missile attack with a second volley intended to target first responders. In Pakistan, this procedure has resulted in a ratio of fifty innocent victims for every “suspected militant” taken out in a drone strike.

The killer who slaughtered the innocent at Sandy Hook is dead. The Child-Killing Apparatus over which Obama presides continues merrily along. Americans understandably shaken and saddened to the depth of their souls by the horrors in Newtown should consider this: The government that impudently presumes to rule us has made Sandy Hook-style massacres routine for residents of Pakistan. 

Requiescat in pace, filii carissimi

"Damned from Memory": When the Drug War Turns on its Own

 

John McLaughlin, known to his friends as “Sparky,” was a True Believer in the War on Drugs. He was convinced that his work as an agent of the Pennsylvania Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement (BNI) was protecting innocent people from opportunists and thugs who prey on the weak. 

He eventually came to the sorrowful realization that the most ruthless elements involved in the drug trade aren’t found in Latin America or blighted urban neighborhoods, but in well-appointed offices in Washington, D.C. and Langley, Virginia. McLaughlin also came to understand, from first-hand experience, that the Drug War has created an all-encompassing police state that targets not only the innocent public, but also law enforcement officers who become irritants to government-protected criminal cliques. 

"Sparky" McLaughlin Today

McLaughlin and three of his colleagues, working with the Drug Enforcement Administration, identified an east coast drug syndicate that was selling heroin and using the proceeds to fund a U.S.-supported political campaign in the Dominican Republic. 

The syndicate was operated by leaders and activists in the Dominican Revolutionary Party (DRP) on behalf of its standard-bearer, Jose Francisco Pena-Gomez, who – according to a January 17, 1996 CIA memo obtained by McLaughlin – was the Clinton administration’s choice to occupy the National Palace in Santo Domingo. (Pena-Gomez, as it happens, lost the election.) 

After McLaughlin’s squad learned that several suspects were to deliver $550,000 in drug proceeds at a March 28, 1996 DRP fundraiser in Manhattan, they contacted the DEA and arranged a sting operation intended to bring about several high-profile arrests, including that of Pena-Gomez himself. 

At the last minute, the operation inexplicably fell apart. Pena-Gomez, who received a conveniently timed anonymous death threat, was taken into custody by the NYPD and spirited back to the Dominican Republic. At least some of the drug proceeds were given to then-Vice President Al Gore at a DNC fundraiser in Coogan’s Irish Pub in New York City’s Washington Heights. 

McLaughlin points out that just prior to the sting operation, he had refused a demand from a CIA agent named Victoria Baylor that he provide the names of confidential informants within the Dominican drug network. 

“Someone from Washington stepped in and crushed our attempt to seize over $550,000 in proceeds from narcotics sales laundered as fundraising for a third-world political campaign,” writes McLaughlin in his newly published memoir Damned from Memory. “Further, several dozen law enforcement officers stood by on orders from the DEA Sensitive Activities Committee or some other nameless D.C. entity as these funds illegally left our country. No one was touching Pena-Gomez or his entourage.”

Not content to intervene on behalf of Pena-Gomez, the people who scuttled the sting retaliated against McLaughlin and his squad. One of the informants who had helped expose the DRP drug connection was targeted in a car bomb attack and his house was firebombed. The agents were given a series of punitive demotions and transfers and threatened with spurious civil rights lawsuits. 

McLaughlin was transferred a considerable distance from his home in Philadelphia and given contradictory orders that were “aimed at creating situations where the Attorney General [would] get the justification to fire us.” A “black bag” break-in took place at McLaughlin’s home. A few weeks later, an intruder broke into the home office of McLaughlin’s psychiatrist and rifled through the doctor’s patient files. 

Shortly after the second black-bag job, McLaughlin went to a local club where he was greeted by a long-time friend on the police force who called him over to a table already occupied by several other cops. Brimming with bogus bonhomie, the officer invited McLaughlin to reminisce about times past – and perhaps to regale the table with potentially compromising stories about his time on the police force. 

“Hey, Spark,” the officer began, “remember when…?”

“It didn’t matter what followed those four little words,” McLaughlin recalls. “I knew he was wired, or one of those police officers around him was.” 

McLaughlin knew he was being kept under surveillance by people who were determined not only to ruin his career, but put him in prison. Someone who had been through a very similar experience had warned McLaughlin to expect nothing less.

In 1997, McLaughlin contacted investigative reporter Gary Webb of the San Jose Mercury News, who the previous August had published an expose documenting the “dark alliance” between street-level drug dealers and the CIA. Webb’s stories described how a San Francisco-based drug ring “sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to an arm of the Contra guerillas of Nicaragua run by the Central Intelligence Agency.”

The key figure in that alliance was “Freeway Rick” Ross, who obtained cut-rate cocaine from CIA-backed wholesalers; he then converted the powder into crack, which was sold through local franchises across the country. A large share of the proceeds obtained from those sales was given to the Nicaraguan Democratic Front, the largest of several CIA-organized rebel groups fighting the Soviet-backed Sandinista government. 

“This drug network opened the first pipeline between Colombia’s cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a city now known as the `crack’ capital of the world,” wrote Webb. “The cocaine that flooded in helped spark a crack explosion in urban America – and provided the cash and connections needed for L.A.’s gangs to buy weapons.” 

By the time McLaughlin contacted Webb, the reporter had already been disavowed by his editor – not because the stories were poorly sourced or badly written, but because of a concerted pressure campaign orchestrated by the CIA and its allies in the media. 

“We are having one heck of a time with Dominican drug traffickers and the same people you were investigating back in August,” McLaughlin told Webb.

“You mean the CIA,” Webb immediately replied.

McLaughlin asked Webb if in the course of investigating the CIA’s role in fomenting the crack epidemic he had seen evidence that the Agency had sought to destroy “the reputation and credibility” of the officers who had uncovered the connection.

“Most certainly,” Webb responded. After McLaughlin briefly described what had happened in the Pena-Gomez case, the reporter warned him: “You’re in for a long road full of sh*t; I’m already up to my neck in it.”

Despite the fact that subsequent investigations by the CIA’s Inspector General and a Senate committee vindicated Webb’s reporting, the writer was ruined, both professionally and personally. In December 2004, Webb – who was divorced, penniless, unemployed and unemployable, and facing eviction – became a member of that exclusive club of suicide victims who somehow managed to shoot themselves in the head, twice. 

A similar fate nearly befell former Immigration and Naturalization Service agent Joe Occhipinti.  In the course of a murder investigation in 1988, Occhipinti uncovered a money laundering operation in which several bodegas operated by members of the Dominican Federation were laundering drug proceeds on behalf of Seacrest Trading Company, a Connecticut-based finance company that specializes in high-interest loans to shady enterprises.

According to Occhipinti and several other investigators, Sea Crest was actually CIA front. This helps explain why Occhipinti’s investigation ended with the investigator himself being prosecuted on civil rights charges – none of which involved corruption, brutality, or dishonesty -- and sentenced to 36 months behind bars with many of the same Dominican crime figures he had investigated. 

McLaughlin managed to avoid prison. In 2002 he and fellow BNI agent Charles Micewski filed a civil rights lawsuit against Pennsylvania Attorney General Mike Fisher and several other state officials. The following February a federal jury ruled in their favor, granting them a total of $1.5 million in punitive damages and – much more importantly – vindicating their account of what had happened to them after they had investigated one of the many domestic drug networks either created or protected by the CIA. 

Unfortunately -- albeit predictably -- that judgment was overturned by the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals, where Mike Fisher -- the Attorney General who was the defendant in that case -- now sits as a judge. 

 I first covered McLaughlin’s story in 1997 while I was a senior editor at The New American magazine. Shortly after Damned from Memory was published I asked him if his view of War on Drugs had changed as a result of his experiences. “I think the best thing right now is to stress education,” he replied. He’s seen “The Needle and the Damage Done” – and also witnessed the violence and institutional corruption that is the inevitable result of treating vices as if they were crimes.

“I have seen an informant’s son with nothing but goo left on his arm from shooting up so much,” McLaughlin recalls. As a result of heroin addiction, the young man “was the walking dead. We saved him as a little project between ourselves.”

It’s worth noting that this commendable rehabilitation “project” wouldn’t have happened if the addict had been treated like a criminal. It’s just as important to remember that the people who profit from human misery of this kind are empowered by prohibition – and that the most despicable examples of that criminal caste are “public servants,” not private entrepreneurs.

The "war on drugs" is a narcotics price support program and a public works project for the coercive sector (especially the prison-industrial complex). It also provides an apparently bottomless well of revenue to fund the projects in subversion and state terrorism carried out by the CIA and its affiliates.

As Professor Alfred W. McCoy of the University of Wisconsin-Madison points out, through drug prohibition, police act as "an informal regulator, controlling the volume of vice trading and setting the level of syndication"; this results in the creation of "powerful syndicates and a high volume of illicit activity."  

According to former DEA undercover operative Michael Levine, "The fundamental problem with the so-called war on drugs is that both sides are winning -- the drug lords and the `suits' -- because they both are making a killing” because of prohibition. That’s one reason why investigators like John McLaughlin are rewarded for gathering up huge volumes of tiny fish – and severely punished when they disturb any of the politically protected barracudas.

In a 1997 interview, Levine told me about a conversation he had with a CIA officer in Argentina eighteen years earlier. 

"There was a small group of us gathered for a drinking party at the CIA guy's apartment," Levine recalled. "There were several Argentine police officers there as well; at the time, Argentina was a police state in which people could be taken into custody without warning, tortured, and then `disappeared.'"

In other words, it differed little from what America has now become.

To continue:

"At one point my associate in the CIA said that he preferred Argentina's approach to social order, and that America should be more like that country. Somebody asked, `Well, how does a change of that sort happen?' The spook replied that it was necessary to create a situation of public fear -- a sense of impending anarchy and social upheaval in which the people will literally plead with Congress, `Take whatever rights you need, but save us...."

By now it should be clear to any rational person that we need to be saved from the Prohibitionists. 

Dum spiro, pugno!