"I Am Kerik!" What We Can Learn from Giuliani's Buddy Bernie

Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.

Rudy Giuliani, 1994

(Thanks to Anthony Gregory for the tip on that quote.)

Political criticism is our enemy's best friend.

Bernard Kerik, October 20, 2003

According to Fascism, a true, a great spiritual life cannot take place unless the State has risen to a position of pre-eminence in the world of man. The curtailment of liberty thus becomes justified at once, with this need of raising the State to its rightful position.

Fascist Party ideological spokesman Mario Palmieri, 1936 (The Philosophy of Fascism -- Chicago: The Dante Alighieri Society, 1936, pg 99.)

For the discerning talk radio consumer, Dennis Miller's Mensa-level snarkiness plays much better than Sean Hannity's pugnacious ignorance. But take away Miller's wit and literacy, his ability to speak in complete sentences, and his ability to refine GOP talking points into something that sounds like his personal opinions, and what remains is pretty much the same message Hannity feeds tirelessly to the mouth-breathing cultists who compose his core audience: The President's gotta keep that pimp hand strong, or the “Islamo-Fascists” will defeat us.

In Rudolph Giuliani, both Hannity and Miller see George W. Bush's ideal successor. Hannity, aware that his core audience cares about such things as abortion and traditional marriage, does cavil somewhat about Rudy's, shall we say, unconventional personal life (imagine the sitcom version of Jerry Seinfeld as a sociopathic politician with the world's least persuasive comb-over, and you've got Mayor Rudy) and his liberal views of social issues.

But the important thing, Hannity insists, is that the next president focus primarily on fighting the war on terror, both at home and abroad.

Miller is refreshingly candid about the same priorities – which define the president Republican agenda.

Dispensing with all pretense of concern about social issues, Miller believes that the public is ready for an unapologetically authoritarian president, and, in Giuliani, Il Duce and the moment have met.

Portrait of Il Duce as La Regina: Rudy in drag.

Giuliani, it must be said, is certainly not reluctant to hymn the praises of authority.

“We look upon authority too often and focus over and over again, for 30 or 40 or 50 years, as if there is something wrong with authority,” he stated at a 1994 symposium on urban crime sponsored by the New York Post. “We see only the oppressive side of authority. Maybe it comes out of our history and our background. What we don't see is that freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be.”

“We're going to come through this when we realize that it's all about, ultimately, individual responsibility,” continued Giuliani, who is nothing if not the poster child for individual responsibility. “That in fact the criminal act is about individual responsibility and the building of the respect for the law and ethics is also a matter of individual responsibility.”

There is an unspoken dichotomy in Giuliani's view of authority and responsibility, and it was made vivid in his relationship with former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik:

Authority is the exclusive possession of the political class.

Individual responsibility, respect for the law, and ethics are for the lesser beings who don't belong to that exalted caste.

Six years after offering his little tutorial about “individual responsibility... respect for the law and ethics,” Giuliani appointed to the post of NYC Police Commissioner a man he knew had ties to organized crime.

Bernard Kerik's chief qualifications for that post, according to his detractors, were his canine loyalty to Giuliani and his gift for self-promotion. He became Giuliani's driver and bodyguard during the 1993 mayoral campaign, after which he was appointed head of the Corrections Department, where he reportedly did a more than adequate job, although he turned the department (and a related foundation over which he presided in an apparent conflict of interest) into a patronage pinata.

Kerik “spent much of his own term [as Commissioner] writing an autobiography,” notes Fred Kaplan of Slate. This involved, among other things, sending police officers to Ohio to pin down details about his long-deceased mother, and using others (including a homicide investigator) to track down his publisher's missing cell phone.

One wonders how much “respect for law” Kerik displayed as Police Commissioner by using police officers as research assistants and errand boys. But under the Giuliani doctrine, such questions are moot, at least as they apply to those clothed in the State's authority.

For reasons rooted in cronyism, Kerik was sent to Iraq in May 2003 to supervise reconstruction of that country's civilian police force. His job, as he defined it in a conversation with the State Department reconstruction official in charge of Iraqi police, was “to bring more media attention to the good work on police because the situation is probably not as bad as people think it is.”

Apart from swaggering around the country in a Kevlar vest, with a handgun strapped to his side and surrounded by a posse of South African mercenaries, Kerik did little during his three-month tour (originally scheduled to be six months in duration, which was roughly one-third the time serious analysts thought would be necessary to get Iraq's civilian police system operating) as Iraq's interim Interior Minister.

This week's murderous police rampage in Tal Afar offers one measure of Kerik's success in reconstituting Iraq's police force.

Kerik wasn't working to restore Iraq; he (like the other Bushevik apparatchiks working in “reconstruction”) was building his resume. In late 2004, when Tom Ridge resigned as the first Commissar for Homeland Security, Giuliani reportedly lobbied Bush long, hard, and successfully for Kerik to be appointed successor. (“Rudy cashed in a chip on this one,” a “White House source” told the New York Daily News at the time.)

Like Zoe Baird, one of Bill Clinton's failed Attorney General nominees, Kerik was caught in a “nanny trap” and was forced to withdraw. It's likely that the Republican-dominated Senate would have confirmed Kerik despite questions about the immigration status of one of his part-time housekeepers. I suspect that Kerik withdrew because his confirmation hearings, however perfunctory, would likely have exposed a great deal more about the squalid underside of the emerging Crony Capitalism/Garrison State Regime – more than its rulers were comfortable disclosing at that time, in any case.

(It would have been interesting to learn about Kerik's ties to Taser International, the folks who manufacture the portable “Electric chair starter kit” devices now used so promiscuously by police; he joined TI's board in 2002, after leaving the Commissioner post, and made $6 million cashing in company stock options in November 2004, just before Amnesty International released a report documenting that scores in the US had been killed by use of the supposedly non-lethal Taser gun during the previous three years. NYPD invested heavily in Tasers, as did -- of course -- the Department of Homeland Security.)

What role would Kerik play in a Giuliani administration? This would largely depend on the make-up of the Senate, of course. It's unlikely that Giuliani would nominate him for a position that requires Senate confirmation, but the metastasizing Homeland Security bureaucracy would offer plenty of other patronage options.

If the GOP nominates Giuliani, it will ratify the Giuliani dichotomy as official party doctrine, which could be summarized thus: Those in power can do as they will; those against whom power is exercised must simply endure it.

Please visit The Right Source -- and check out the second issue of the Pro Libertate e-journal.

The Military Commission and the "Monster" Washington Made

At left: Hicks as a volunteer for the "Kosovo Liberation Army" in 1999 -- when the terrorist group was an ally of Washington in its war on Yugoslavia.

David Hicks, the Australian national who inexplicably became a convert to Jihad-centered Islam, is the first person to be found guilty of terrorism-related charges under the terms of the Military Commissions Act (MCA).

Two aspects of Hicks's case are genuinely remarkable:

First, although he pleaded guilty – following five years of detention and the dismissal of most of his legal counsel by the presiding judge -- to the charge of “providing material support for terrorism,” Hicks wasn't accused of plotting to attack the United States or any American citizen.

Second, Hicks began his career as a Jihadi working with the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which may be the only Islamist terror group accurately described as “Islamo-Fascist.” The pedigree of that organization, as New York Times foreign correspondent Christopher Hedges pointed out in the late 1990s, is traced on one side to the worst elements of Stalinist Marxism, and on the other side to the Skanderbeg militias organized by the SS in the Balkans during World War II.

So it does no violence to the facts to call the KLA “Islamo-Fascist,” although “Islamo-Leninist” would still be a better description.

And it should not be forgotten that at the time Hicks was working with the KLA, the group was likewise receiving material assistance not only from Osama bin-What's-His-Name (you know, the Guy Bush Doesn't Worry About), but also from Washington and London.

It has been said that the crime of terrorism consists of privatizing the official violence routinely practiced by governments. And most terrorist groups of any consequence work as subcontractors for national governments, or international alliances of some kind. This was very much the case with the KLA, which was used by Washington and London as the spearhead in an attack on the former Yugoslavia.

After being thrust into power by the 1999 NATO terror-bombing of Serbia, the KLA proceeded to terrorize Kosovo's Christian Serbs, as well as the peaceful Albanian Muslims living in that Serbian province. The group is now entrenched as the UN-installed government of Kosovo.

David Hicks reportedly went to Kosovo to train with the KLA in 1999 – which means that he was giving material support to a terrorist group that was an ally of Washington (and that he may in fact have been working with CIA operatives who were providing training and assistance to the KLA at the time).

Hicks was working as a horse trainer in Japan when he learned about the KLA. In a letter to his parents he explained that he had joined the group (“I thought it was an airline,” his father later explained) to fight the Serbs. Since fighting the Serbs – who had been routinely demonized in the western media as the Nazis reborn -- had been official U.S. policy for several years, it's reasonable to say that it was Washington that recruited Hicks into the ranks of Jihad.

After converting to Islam, Hicks went to Pakistan where he joined a Kashmiri Islamic separatist group called Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET, or “Army of the Pure”).The LET aspires to convert India into a Sharia-ruled Islamic state, and it has provided support to Islamic rebels in Chechnya, but it displays no documented interest in attacking the US. While fighting with the LET, Hicks reportedly got off a few rounds in the direction of Indian forces in Kashmir, but did nothing to molest any American citizen in any way.

Hicks migrated to Afghanistan in 2000 and became a convert to Taliban-style Islamic fundamentalism. Following the 9-11 attacks, he telephoned his father to tell him that he was going to be fighting on behalf of the Taliban against the Northern Alliance. He was captured by the Northern Alliance outside Kandahar in December 2001, and turned over to US custody.

The dossier on Hicks claims that he was at some point trained by al-Qaeda, and that he helped conduct surveillance on US and British embassies in Kabul. If true, this suggests that Hicks was well on his way to becoming a full-fledged anti-Western Jihadist by the time he was captured by the Northern Alliance. But it shouldn't be forgotten that he was sucked into an Islamist pipeline that was created primarily by Washington – which sponsored the KLA, and also created the Mujahadeen network from which both the Taliban and al-Qaeda sprang.

Should David Hicks have been prosecuted? Definitely – by the Serbs, or by the Indian government, both of which have jurisdiction over any terrorist of insurrectionist acts in which Hicks was implicated. Perhaps he should have been turned over to Australia for trial.

But unless we are to assume that Washington has universal jurisdiction, it had no business detaining and trying Hicks – a foreign national – for alleged offenses committed in the Balkans and Central Asia.

And if Hicks is to be regarded as a terrorist for lending material aid to the KLA, then he should have enjoyed the august company of some celebrity co-defendants in the dock – Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, William Cohen, Tony Blair, George Robertson, Javier Solana.... The list would be quite impressive, and the resulting spectacle most satisfying.

Cardassian "Court TV": Residents of Cardassia Prime watch a show trial intended to make vivid the infallible wisdom of the State.

The military commission that “tried” Hicks is a “prerogative court” akin to the notorious Star Chamber – a burlesque of a judicial body, one that exists only to ratify the executive's will, rather than to determine facts and do justice. It is the lineal descendant of the Soviet “justice” system, a real-life analogue of fictional Cardassian tribunals, in which the objective is to demonstrate the State's infallibility – and the “defense” counsel's role is to help the defendant understand and accept the State's wisdom.

This was made clear by the treatment of Hicks's legal counsel, two of whom were dismissed by the presiding military judge for arcane and whimsical reasons. In fact, Hicks's chief counsel, Joshua Dretel, was dismissed because he refused to sign a document agreeing to abide by court regulations that have not yet been written.

I've pointed this out before, but it bears repeating:

About a decade ago, I co-produced a documentary entitled “Injustice For All: The International Criminal Court” that set out the reasons for opposing the UN's trial court. The UN's trial court claims universal jurisdiction and the right to prosecute citizens of countries that did not ratify the ICC Statute. The ICC does not recognize the due process rights and guarantees integral to Anglo-Saxon law; its standards of evidence and operating guidelines are being invented on the fly; hearsay, double-hearsay, and other grievously flawed testimony can be used as evidence at the ICC. The ad hoc UN tribunals that provided the model for the ICC often “extradited” defendants through kidnapping, or what we now call “extraordinary rendition.”

Every single element of the indictment against the ICC applies to the legal system being created by the Bush Regime in the name of fighting terrorism. Many of the same people who denounced the ICC are volubly applauding the version of the same pseudo-judicial abomination created through the Military Commissions Act.

The ICC could be considered a threat to Americans, albeit one that's a cloud on the horizon the size of a man's hand.

The MCA, however, is an immediate threat to Americans, or anyone else, who attracts the malign attention of Washington.

People who ignore or fail to understand this, I suspect, have been osculating the Dear Leader's posterior for so long they've simply become inured to the pungent odor of totalitarianism.

Be sure to check out The Right Source -- and look for a new issue of Pro Libertate (the e-zine) very soon.

Death Squad in Delaware: The Case of the Murdered Marine (UPDATED)

UPDATE --

Scott Horton of Antiwar.com kindly invited me to be a guest on Antiwar radio to discuss the outrageous killing of Derek Hale.

He survived Iraq, only to suffer Death By Government in the "Land of the Free": Sgt. Derek J. Hale, USMC, ret. -- RIP

Delaware was the first state to ratify the U.S. Constitution. It may be the first state to be afflicted with a fully operational death squad – unless a civil lawsuit filed on Friday against the murders of Derek J. Hale results in criminal charges and a complete lustration (in the Eastern European sense of the term) of Delaware's law enforcement establishment.

Hale, a retired Marine Sergeant who served two tours in Iraq and was decorated before his combat-related medical discharge in January 2006, was murdered by a heavily armed 8-12-member undercover police team in Wilmington, Delaware last November 6. He had come to Wilmington from his home in Manassas, Virginia to participate in a Toys for Tots event.

Derek was house-sitting for a friend on the day he was murdered. Sandra Lopez, the ex-wife of Derek's friend, arrived with an 11-year-old son and a 6-year-old daughter just shortly before the police showed up. After helping Sandra and her children remove some of their personal belongings, Derek was sitting placidly on the front step, clad in jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, when an unmarked police car and a blacked-out SUV arrived and disgorged their murderous cargo.

Unknown to Derek, he had been under police surveillance as part of a ginned-up investigation into the Pagan Motorcycle Club, which he had joined several months before; the Pagans sponsored the “Toys for Tots Run” that had brought Derek to Delaware. As with any biker club, the Pagans probably included some disreputable people in their ranks. Derek was emphatically not one of them.

In addition to his honorable military service (albeit in a consummately dishonorable war), Derek's personal background was antiseptically clean. He had a concealed carry permit in Virginia, which would not have been issued to him if he'd been convicted of a felony, a narcotics or domestic violence charge, or had any record of substance abuse or mental illness.

On the day he was killed, Derek had been under both physical and electronic (and, according to the civil complaint, illegal) surveillance. Police personnel who observed him knew that his behavior was completely innocuous. And despite the fact that he had done nothing to warrant such treatment, he was considered an “un-indicted co-conspirator” in a purported narcotics ring run by the Pagans.

The police vehicles screeched to a halt in front of the house shortly after 4:00 p.m. They ordered Lopez and her children away from Derek – who, predictably, had risen to his feet by this time -- and then ordered him to remove his hands from his the pockets of his sweatshirt.

(Click to enlarge)

Less than a second later – according to several eyewitnesses at the scene – Derek was hit with a taser blast that knocked him sideways and sent him into convulsions. His right hand involuntarily shot out of its pocket, clenching spasmodically.

“Not in front of the kids,” Derek gasped, as he tried to force his body to cooperate. “Get the kids out of here.”

The officers continued to order Derek to put up his hands; he was physically unable to comply.

So they tased him again. This time he was driven to his side and vomited into a nearby flower bed.

Howard Mixon, a contractor who had been working nearby, couldn't abide the spectacle.

“That's not necessary!” he bellowed at the assailants. “That's overkill! That's overkill!”

At this point, one of the heroes in blue (or, in this case, black) swaggered over to Mixon and snarled, “I'll f*****g show you overkill!” Having heroically shut up an unarmed civilian, the officer turned his attention back to Derek – who was being tased yet again.

“I'm trying to get my hands out,” Derek exclaimed, desperately trying to make his tortured and traumatized body obey his will. Horrified, his friend Sandra screamed at the officers: “He is trying to get his hands out, he cannot get his hands out!”

Having established that Derek – an innocent man who had survived two tours of duty in Iraq – was defenseless, one of Wilmington's Finest closed in for the kill.

Lt. William Brown of the Wilmington Police Department, who was close enough to seize and handcuff the helpless victim, instead shot him in the chest at point-blank range, tearing apart his vitals with three .40-caliber rounds. He did this after Derek had said, repeatedly and explicitly, that he was trying to cooperate. He did this despite the fact that witnesses on the scene had confirmed that Derek was trying to cooperate. He did this in front of a traumatized mother and two horrified children.

Why was this done?

According to Sgt. Steven Elliot of the WPD, Brown slaughtered Derek Hale because he “feared for the safety of his fellow officers and believed that the suspect was in a position to pose an imminent threat.” That subjective belief was sufficient justification to use “deadly force,” according to Sgt. Elliot.

The “position” Derek was in, remember, was that of wallowing helplessly in his own vomit, trying to overcome the cumulative effects of three completely unjustified Taser attacks.

When asked by the Wilmington News Journal last week if Hale had ever threatened the officers – remember, there were at least 8 and as many as 12 of them – Elliot replied: “In a sense, [he threatened the officers] when he did not comply with their commands.”

He wasn't given a chance to comply: He was hit with the first Taser strike less than a second after he was commanded to remove his hands from his pockets, and then two more in rapid succession. The killing took roughly three minutes.

As is always the case when agents of the State murder an innocent person, the WPD immediately went into cover-up mode. The initial account of the police murder claimed that Derek had “struggled with undercover Wilmington vice officers”; that “struggle,” of course, referred to Derek's involuntary reaction to multiple, unjustified Taser strikes.

The account likewise mentioned that police recovered “two items that were considered weapons” from Derek's body. Neither was a firearm. One was a container of pepper spray. The other was a switchblade knife. Both were most likely planted on the murder victim: The police on the scene had pepper spray, and Derek's stepbrother, Missouri resident Jason Singleton, insists that Derek never carried a switchblade.

“The last time I saw Derek,” Jason told the News Journal, “he had a small Swiss Army knife. I've never seen Derek with anything like a switchblade.”

Within hours, the WPD began to fabricate a back-story to justify Derek's murder. Several Delware State Police officers – identified in the suit (.pdf) as “Lt. [Patrick] Ogden, Sgt. Randall Hunt, and other individual DSP [personnel]” contacted the police in Masassas, Virginia and informed him that Derek had been charged with drug trafficking two days before he was murdered. This was untrue. But because it was said by someone invested with the majestic power of the State, it was accepted as true, and cited in a sworn affidavit to secure a warrant to search Derek's home.

Conducting this spurious search – which was, remember, play-acting in the service of a cover story -- meant shoving aside Derek's grieving widow, Elaine, and her two shattered children, who had just lost their stepfather. Nothing of material consequence was found, but a useful bit of embroidery was added to the cover story.

Less than two weeks earlier, Derek and Elaine had celebrated their first anniversary.

The Delaware State Police officers are guilty of misprison of perjury, as are the officials who collaborated in this deception. And it's entirely likely that the Virginia State Police had guilty knowledge as well.

Last November 21, in an attempt to pre-empt public outrage, the highest officials of the Delaware State Police issued a press release in conjunction with their counterparts from Virginia. The statement is a work of unalloyed mendacity.

“Hale resisted arrest and was shot and killed by Wilmington Police on November 6, 2006,” lied the signatories with reference to the claim that he "resisted." “Hale was at the center of a long term narcotics trafficking investigation which is still ongoing.”

As we've seen, Hale did not resist arrest, as everyone on the scene knew. And he was not at the “center” of any investigation; before his posthumous promotion to “un-indicted co-conspirator,” he was merely a “person of interest” because of his affiliation with a motorcycle club.

Most critically, the statement – which bears the august imprimatur of both the Delaware and Virginia State Police departments, remember – asserts: “Both [State Police] Superintendents have confirmed that there was never any false information exchanged by either agency in the investigation of Derek J. Hale, or transmitted between the agencies in order to obtain the search warrant.”

This was another lie.

“Delaware State Police spokesperson Sgt. Melissa Zebley conceded last week that no arrest warrant for Hale was ever issued,” reported the News Journal on March 22. Three days after Hale was murdered, police arrested 12 members of the Pagans Motorcycle Club on various drug and weapons charges, but identified Hale at that point only as a “person of interest.”

Last Friday (May 23), the Rutherford Institute – one of the precious few nominally conservative activist groups that give half a damn about individual liberty – and a private law firm in Virginia filed a civil rights lawsuit against several Delaware law enforcement and political officials on behalf of Derek's widow and parents. They really should consider including key officials from the Virginia State Police in the suit, as well.

Those who persist in fetishizing local police – who are, at this point, merely local franchises of a unitary, militarized, Homeland Security apparatus – should ponder this atrocity long and hard.

They should contemplate not only the inexplicable eagerness of Lt. William Brown to kill a helpless, paralyzed pseudo-suspect, but also the practiced ease with which the police establishments of two states collaborated in confecting a fiction to cover up that crime.

According to the lawsuit, Lt. Brown, Derek's murderer, “has violated the constitutional rights of others in the past through the improper use of deadly force and has coached other WPD officers on how to lie about and/or justify the improper use of deadly force.” Rather than being cashiered, Brown was promoted – just as one would expect of any other dishonest, cowardly thug in the service of any other Third World death squad.

Derek J. Hale survived two tours of duty in Iraq, a country teeming with Pentagon-trained death squads, only to be murdered by their home-grown equivalent.

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