Fabricating Felonies: Idaho v. William N. Grigg?

Felony, n.

1. One of several grave crimes, such as murder, rape, or burglary, punishable by a more stringent sentence than that given for a misdemeanor.

2. Any of several crimes in early English law that were punishable by forfeiture of land or goods and by possible loss of life or a bodily part.

“What the hell is it now?” I exclaimed, my uncharacteristic lapse into vulgarity provoked by the sight of a police officer striding across our front lawn.

It was the afternoon of a day whose dawn I had welcomed while treating a migraine headache. Few things are more effective at inflicting that condition upon a head of a household than the combination of a young family with expanding needs, a steadily depleting bank account, mercilessly rising price inflation, and the approaching specter of Income Tax Day. And there's nothing quite so aggravating as waking up with a headache -- except perhaps a day that steadily deteriorates from there, as yesterday did for me.

By the time the police officer, without showing a warrant or judicial writ of any kind, had invaded our home, my day had already been disfigured by the breakdown of a major appliance and our antiquated mini-van. So my mood was thoroughly poisonous by the time I strode into our backyard to find out, as it were, what the hell it was now.

“We received a report that there is an abused or neglected animal at this address,” the she-police informed me in what she mistakenly believed to be an authoritative voice, pawing at Chief, our 6-month-old German Shepherd. Chief, who is a little on the skinny side but not otherwise in unusual condition, responded to this news by looking at me worshipfully and wagging his tail. My reaction wasn't nearly as cheerful.

“From whom did you receive this `report'?” I asked in firm but level tone.

“It was an anonymous call,” replied the officer, briskly changing the subject as if it were closed.

“How old is this dog?” she asked. “He appears to be about twenty pounds underweight.”

“Chief is about six months old,” I replied, mentally bookmarking the business about an anonymous “report.” “We got him about a month ago.”

Does this dog look emaciated to you? No, it's not Chief -- but the resemblance is amazing.

“What are you feeding him?” persisted the officer, who as far as I could tell had provided no justification for her presence in our backyard, let alone for her attempt to interrogate me and Korrin (who had joined me by this time).

“I've met you before,” the officer told Korrin, going on to mention that she had seen Korrin and our children with the dog at a local park less than a week earlier, and noticed that the dog seemed a little thin but was well-behaved and content. I bookmarked that fact as well, and tried to answer the question the officer asked before this digression.

“We've been giving him first year puppy chow,” I replied, not seeing how this information could be construed as self-incriminating.

“Ah, well he's grown out of that by now,” the officer declared, proceeding to tell me a specific brand of dog food she considers suitable, and offering the suggestion – no, actually a species of order – that we treat him with a de-worming medicine.

This was all very useful advice, of course, and would have been most welcome had it not been provided by an armed agent of the State who proceeded to threaten me with prison.

“You need to get some weight on that dog,” she said. “I'll have to write this up, because we did receive a report. And I'll have to check back in a few weeks. He seems to be all right; his coat looks fine, and I can tell from the way he acts that he hasn't been abused. But if he's still severely underweight when I come back, we're looking at an animal abuse and neglect charge which is a felony.”

“It is possible to charge me with a felony on the basis of an anonymous `report'?” I asked in a voice that could freeze magma. “Who, exactly, reported the supposed abuse of our dog?”

“I don't know,” the officer replied, as if this were a trivial point, which it isn't. “It was a Fruitland phone number” -- Fruitland being a small town about three miles away. “But since we received a report I was sent here, and now I'm the one who has to make the evaluation.”

“Actually, I have a right to confront my accuser,” I pointed out as politely as I could, which was more than the situation deserved. “And you didn't have probable cause. You pointed out that you saw Chief in the park a few days ago, and he appeared perfectly fine then. Which means that you received a spurious report, and your visit is the `fruit of a poisoned tree.'”

She reiterated her contention that it didn't matter how or why she was there, or what her earlier assessment of Chief's condition may have been.

At this point, Poe's Imp of the Perverse alighted on my shoulder and whispered a transgressive thought in my ear:

This officer is a bear-hug away from a hostage situation – or eternity.

True enough: She was a woman in her late 40s, maybe 5'4” and around 150 pounds. I'm a male in my early 40s who is 5'11” and about 280 pounds (vanity compels me to point out that I'm describing 280 pounds that can be forced through 150-straight Hindu pushups, which I did later in the day to de-toxify from the accumulated rage and frustration). She was armed with a Taser and a handgun. She was, however, within arm's reach. Had I been an actual felon, she would have been in mortal jeopardy.

She knew I wasn't a criminal. And she admitted, at the end of her visit, that there was nothing wrong with Chief that a de-worming and decent diet wouldn't fix. But she was compelled by what she was pleased to call the “law” to treat me as a potential felon, and leave me in a state akin to probation: She is scheduled to return May 1 to see if Chief has put on weight, at which time she would “close the case.”

Let it be said that this officer was not an unpleasant person. She was professional and reasonably friendly, as well as admirably candid. But the system she serves is utterly malignant.

We are discussing, let us not forget, my property. Chief does not belong to the City of Payette, the State of Idaho, or some ephemeral abstraction called “society.” He belongs to me: I bought him with money earned through my productive labor. Yet on the basis of what must be considered a spurious tip from an informant who is as malicious as he is anonymous, I confront the possibility of being tried for a felony for the purported abuse of my own property – the “abuse” in question being low canine bodyweight.

If convicted of a felony, I would lose the right to vote (until my “citizenship” is “restored”) and, more importantly, the "legal" right to armed self-defense – the latter being the most important distinction between a citizen and a slave.

Please indulge me while I illustrate how my situation would be much worse were I living in another community – say, Wilmington, Delaware, where police have been known to gun down innocent people, including a recently married Iraq veteran, for no discernible reason.

Last February, Delaware announced an initiative called “Operation FED-UP” (Federal Enforcement and Detention coupled with Urban Policing), which will be carried out by a joint local/state/federal task force (the sort of alliance from which proceeds no good thing). This venture in Wilmington grew out of a statewide undertaking called “Project Disarm.”

As of February 9, according to the official announcement from the U.S. Attorney for the State of Delaware, “all felons in possession of firearms arrested by Wilmington Police officers will immediately be transferred to the ATF and detained in federal custody pending an initial appearance before a federal magistrate.” Detention in federal custody will continue until a trial before a federal judge. “In effect, the United States Attorney's Office will serve as the local prosecutor for all felon-in-possession cases in Wilmington.”

I'm not acquainted with the laws governing animal cruelty in Delaware, but let's posit – and why not – that they are similar to those in Idaho. Were I a Wilmington resident accused and convicted of the supposedly felonious offense of having a skinny dog, and then found in possession of a firearm (no sane and moral person would ever relinquish the right to own one), upon arrest I would be taken into federal custody – and most likely end up serving hard time in a federal prison.

Yes, initiatives like “Operation FED-UP” supposedly target hard-core criminals. But they are always driven by statistics, and nothing pads an ambitious federal prosecutor's record quite like scooping up non-violent, law-abiding people who have run afoul of some arcane provision of what our rulers insist on calling the “law.”

Aggravating as my experience has been, it's likely to turn out relatively well. But it is a tangible illustration of how easily any resident of the embryonic garrison state in which we now live can have his freedom extinguished, despite doing absolutely nothing wrong.

Do you have a horror story about a run-in with some agent of the State? Sure -- we all do! Please visit The Right Source and share your experience on our message board. While you're there, check our Kevin Shannon's radio show, the Pro Libertate e-zine, and the daily Liberty Minute audio commentaries, too. And be sure to tell your friends!

The Blackmailer-in-Chief: Bush Threatens The Troops

(Click to enlarge)

For the people I must tell you, that their liberty and freedom consist in having of government, those laws by which their life and their goods may be most their own. It is not for having a share in government, Sirs: that is nothing pertaining to them. A subject and a sovereign are clean different things....

The despotic King Charles I, speaking from the scaffold

In January 1649, a court created by the British Parliament tried, convicted, and ordered the execution of Charles I for treason. As noted here previously, Charles' persistent exercise of spurious executive power culminated in civil war – actually, two separate wars, and the king was plotting a third when he was put on trial.

It's likely that up until the moment his head was smitten from his body by the “clean stroke of the bright axe,” Charles believed that his Royalist adherents would somehow rescue him and resume the war on behalf of regal privilege – the conceit that the king and his subjects were “clean different things,” with the former utterly unaccountable to the latter.

As Geoffrey Robertson documents in his significant new book The Tyrannicide Brief, Charles was incapable of recognizing legal limits on his royal authority. He mounted his war on Parliament in the defense of unalloyed absolutism; during his trial he adamantly refused to recognize the court or Parliament as legal bodies whose authority he had to respect. Had Charles been willing to defer to their authority to the extent of mounting a defense, the verdict probably would have been the same, but the sentence much lighter.

One must give Charles grudging credit for the tenacity he displayed in defending his powers, as he understood them. While he was willing to waste the lives and wealth of his kingdom in the service of his ambition, he displayed remarkable composure when it came time to place his head on the executioner's block.

In this, Charles I – a stammering, despotic, self-enraptured hereditary ruler – displayed infinitely more character than the withered little fool in the White House.

In his press conference today (April 3), the Swaggering Fool, seeking to blackmail Congress into funding his war in Iraq, issued a series of threats against the lives and families of American troops in the field.

The routine is a familiar one to students of budget negotiations: When budget cuts (or reductions in planned increases) are being discussed, make sure that the ax falls first on sympathetic victims – the poor, the elderly, the handicapped, and so on. In this case, Bush is willing to continue his war even if doing so means sending weary, wounded, and under-equipped troops into the meat grinder.

Should Congress not give the bloody-handed Dimwit-in-Chief everything he demands, “the Army will be forced to consider cutting back on equipment, equipment repair and quality-of-life initiatives for our Guard and Reserve forces. These cuts would be necessary because the money will have to be shifted to support the troops on the front lines.”

Of course, the alternative would be to withdraw the troops from Iraq. But Bush wouldn't countenance such a thing.

“The Army also would be forced to consider curtailing some training for Guard and Reserve units here at home,” he continued in his petulant, breathless cadence that. “This would reduce their readiness and could delay their availability to mobilize for missions in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

This wouldn't be a problem if – as the public demands, and every principle of honor and decency requires – we were to end the war and bring our troops home. Such considerations mean nothing to Bush.

If Bush doesn't get what he wants by May, “the Army would be forced to consider slowing or even freezing funding for depots where the equipment our troops depend on is repaired,” he continued. “They will also have to consider delaying or curtailing the training of some active-duty forces, reducing the availability of these forces to deploy overseas. If this happens, some of the forces now deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq may need to be extended because other units are not ready to take their places. If Congress does not act, the Army may also have to delay the formation of new brigade combat teams, preventing us from getting those troops into the pool of forces that are available to deploy. If these new teams are unavailable, we would have to ask other units to extend in the theater.”

Bill Clinton pulled a similar stunt back in 1995, when he inserted U.S. troops into Bosnia and then demanded that Congress fund the mission or be accused of betraying the troops. In this respect, as in so many other ways, Bush has built on the lawless legacy of his predecessor.

Make no mistake: This is nothing less than a threat from Bush to frag our troops unless he gets what he wants. By why shouldn't he? The men and women he sent to Iraq are mere commoners, after all; he and they are "clean different things" from each other.

Please drop by The Right Source and make your views known on our message board.

The Conscience of Lt. Col. Stuart Couch (UPDATED )

A Christian Patriot: Lt. Col. Couch and his wife, Kim

William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!

Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

William Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!

Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's.... And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake....

A Man for All Seasons

For Lt. Col. Stuart Couch, a Marine Corps pilot who became a Navy prosecutor, accused al-Qaeda operative Mohamedou Ould Lahi is a very personal devil.

Slahi has been identified as the individual who assembled the “Hamburg cell” of al-Qaeda, which included the hijacker believed to have piloted United Flight 175 into the south tower of the World Trade Center.

The co-pilot of United 175 on that morning was Michael Horrocks, who had been a very close friend of Couch during their days as pilots in the Marine Corps.

Of all those who lost friends and loved ones on September 11, Couch had a unique opportunity to see some measure of mortal justice done – assuming, of course, that the conventional narrative of that atrocity is reliable, and Lahi had played the role he was accused of playing. Couch was satisfied that those conditions had been met.

And yet, as the Wall Street Journal (sub. req.) reported last Saturday (March 31), Col. Couch, “in what he calls the toughest decision of his military career,” refused to carry out the prosecution of Slahi because he concluded that Slahi's self-incriminating statements had been extorted from him through torture.

Slahi was among the Guantanamo Bay detainees assigned to what the Pentagon called the “varsity program” -- a special program of intensive interrogation for particularly recalcitrant prisoners. As a Navy prosecutor assigned to Gitmo, Couch caught a fleeting glimpse of the Rumsfeld-approved methods in October 2003:

“Accompanied by an escort, he saw a prisoner shackled to the cell floor, rocking back and forth, mumbling as strobe lights flashed. Two men in civilian dress shut the cell door and told Col. Couch to move along. `Did you see that?' he asked his escort. The escort replied: `Yeah, it's approved'.... The treatment resembled the abuse he had been trained to resist if captured; he never expected Americans would be the ones employing it.”

Troubled to the depths of his soul by the experience, Col. Couch and his NCIS case investigator conducted an “under the table” inquiry into the methods used to extract Slahi's confession. What he found was torture.

In 2002, al-Qaeda operative Ramzi Binalshibh named Slahi – who operated an Internet cafe in Germany – as the organizer of the Hamburg cell. At the time of the 9-11 attacks, Slahi was one of the “usual suspects”: US authorities believed he had been involved in the abortive 1999 “Millennium Plot” to bomb LAX. Following 9-11, Slahi had been arrested and shipped to Jordan. After being fingered by Binalshibh, Slahi was taken to Guantanamo Bay.

“I thought, this is America, not Jordan, and they are not going to beat you,” Slahi told a detention review board.

This is true: In America – or at least in that part of Cuba under US jurisdiction – the beatings are subcontracted to foreigners, like the Arabs who seized Slahi and took him, blindfolded, on an hour-long boat ride and then, after going ashore, beat him severely in the presence of a doctor.

The methods used by American interrogators were more sophisticated; they involved “psychological torture, including death threats and intimations that his mother would be raped in custody unless he cooperated.”

The supposed threats to his mother were described to Slahi by an interrogator posing as a White House official named “Navy Captain Collins.” This interrogator gave Slahi “a forged memorandum indicating that [his] mother was being shipped to Guantanamo, and that officials had concerns about her safety as the only woman amid hundreds of male prisoners.... `Capt. Collins' told Mr. Slahi `that if he wanted to help his family he should tell them everything they wanted to know.'”

As he learned of the methods used to break Slahi, Col. Couch – a career military officer, devout Christian, and Eagle Scout – became severely disillusioned; his wife describes him as enduring sleepless nights and “Sunday night blues” as he confronted the prospect of beginning a new work week.

“He wanted to be a good soldier and yet on the other hand felt his duty to God to be the greatest duty that he had,” Bill Wilder of the Center for Christian Study, told the Wall Street Journal. Wilder, a close friend of Col. Couch, recalls: “He said more than once to me that human beings are created in the image of God, and as a result we owe them a certain amount of dignity.”

“Stuart, you need to pray about this,” Wilder advised Col. Couch.

While attending a May 2004 baptism, Couch had a moment of genuine moral clarity – not the ideological counterfeit peddled by war-intoxicated neo-cons, but the sort that comes only from reflecting on God's truth. The liturgical reading ended with the priest asking the congregation if they will “respect the dignity of every human being.”

“When I heard that, I knew I gotta get off the fence,” Col. Couch recalls. Slahi, loathsome as he may be, was a human being; God had created Slahi in His Image, whatever he may have done to disfigure it through his conduct. Furthermore, the methods used by US interrogators had “compromised our ability to prosecute him.... I had seen enough, I had heard enough, I had read enough. I said: `That's it.'”

Couch confronted Army Col. Bob Swann, at the time the chief Gitmo prosecutor, telling him that he was “morally opposed” to torture and would not participate in Slahi's prosecution.

Col. Swann (who is now retired) responded with a taunt taken directly from Collectivism 101: “What makes you think you're so much better than the rest of us?”

“That's not the issue at all!” replied Col. Couch, slamming his hand on Swann's desk. “That's not the point!”

When it became clear that Couch would not handle the prosecution, the Slahi case was reassigned. It sits dormant today, in large measure because of the issues raised by Couch. Now working as a judge in the Navy/Marine Corps Court of Criminal Appeals, Couch expresses the hope that “there's some non-tainted evidence out there that can put [Slahi] in the hole.”

It should be recalled that a few years ago, Senator Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) was flayed by the neo-con media for observing – correctly – that the methods used by some interrogators at Gitmo bore a family resemblance to those used by agents of the Soviet Union and Cambodia's Khmer Rouge. (One of the “special methods” employed at Gitmo was waterboarding, which was used extensively by the Khmer Rouge.) Durbin was widely assailed as a “traitor” for daring to express in public essentially the same objections raised by Col. Couch.

I wouldn't expect that the same Bush-worshiping cultists would hurl the same accusation in the teeth of a career military officer who upheld his oath to the Constitution – and his duty to God – by refusing to be party to crimes committed against the individual allegedly responsible for the murder of a fellow Marine who was among his closest friends.

At this point in our nation's decline, the evil of degenerate collectivism has metastasized into the very marrow of our society. Yet even now our nation is blessed by the presence of men like Lt. Col. Stuart Couch – Christian patriots who put principle above power and popularity.

Is it possible that our nation could somehow be restored? If there is a way back from the brink of abject despotism, it is the course of Christian conscience, as demonstrated by Col. Couch. And, as we are reminded by the approach of Resurrection Sunday, miracles of this magnitude are not without precedent.

UPDATE --

My thanks to Scott Horton of Antiwar.com for graciously inviting me to be a guest on Antiwar Radio to discuss the death of honorably discharged Marine combat veteran Derek Hale at the hands of police in Wilmington, Delaware. You can listen here -- and if you pay close attention you may hear our daughters in the background, who did their best to make sure my attention was divided during the interview!

Please check out the new Liberty Minute audio blog at The Right Source -- and, if you appreciate our work, please pitch in a little bit to help TRS and Pro Libertate stay up and running!