In Praise of Paul Blart (Updated, January 21)

It's funny, 'cause it's true: Paul Blart, the unarmed mall security guard hero of the new film, is a more suitable exemplar of the "protect and serve" ethic than the government's armed enforcement agents.


When tyrants rule, jesters often boldly tell truths that falter on the lips of fear-plagued philosophers. Perhaps this explains why, amid the consolidation of a totalitarian Homeland Security State, it fell to Kevin James, gifted comic actor, mixed martial arts fan, and cinematic role model for economy-sized American men, to put into play the notion that we would be better off doing away with government police forces outright, and entrusting security to private citizens and entrepreneurs.



James co-wrote, co-produced, and stars in the new movie Paul Blart: Mall Cop, a modestly produced family comedy whose immense opening weekend success (it took in something north of $34 million, or nearly twice what the studio expected) surprised everyone but the viewing public. Dismissed by most professional critics but warmly reviewed by paying customers, the film displays every indication of becoming the sleeper hit of Hollywood's post-Christmas discard season.


I earnestly hope the film generates a wave of positive word-of-mouth, not only because it is a nearly ideal family film -- genuinely funny and engaging, wholesome without being insipid -- but also because it is gently subversive in promoting the idea that the increasingly militarized government law enforcement system is at best useless.


The audience meets the titular protagonist during fitness trials for applicants to the New Jersey State Police Academy. Short, chubby and visibly on the cusp of middle age, Blart is surprisingly athletic, blowing through the obstacle course with confidence where younger, less motivated applicants falter. But Blart falls just a few feet short of his objective as he is immobilized by a hypoglycemic blackout -- a condition that will plague him throughout the story.


Like many of us whose gravitational profile is less than optimal, Blart has an unfortunate habit of treating food as a refuge from life's indecencies. A single parent to an adorable child (the mother, an illegal immigrant, abandoned father and daughter once her foothold in the U.S. was secure), Blart works long hours as a mall security guard (he prefers the term "security officer," but
allows that there is some controversy over the proper designation).



Customer service: In a scene from earlier in the film, Officer Blart takes a moment to help a small shopper with a problem.



Owing to his girth, his habit of patrolling while mounted on a Segway-style personal transporter, and -- let's be candid -- his job, Blart endures what sometimes seems like an incessant onslaught of demeaning, even emasculating moments. But he remains cheerful, helpful, and generous, doing whatever he can to make things easier for the paying customers.


While he speaks often about protecting the safety of mall patrons and merchants, it's clear from his actions that he understands the importance of facilitating commerce. Unfortunately, Blart aspires to be a state trooper, which might explain some of the mistakes he makes early in the film -- such as threatening to issue a "speeding citation" to a senior citizen in a motorized wheelchair, or to make a "citizen's arrest" of a turbulent woman at Victoria's Secret.


The latter incident ends with the woman -- whose size and body composition are similar to Blart's -- thrashing the hapless security guard, not because Blart is unable to handle her but because he simply will not, under any circumstances, assault a woman.


The civilized self-restraint displayed by this fictional security guard contrasts very well with the documented behavior of too many real-life government police hooligans.



He's scared, but he's not running away: Officer Blart conducts a recon of the hostage site (left), and leads several pursuing robbers into an ambush (below, right).


While making his rounds just prior to Thanksgiving, Blart has what movie people call a "meet cute" with a pretty wig merchant named Amy, but the romantic possibilities initially appear to be stymied by developments I won't describe here.


When "Black Friday" -- the day after Thanksgiving, the busiest retail shopping day of the year -- rolls around, Blart is at his post, helping the gears of commerce turn smoothly. A video arcade proprietor, eager to go to the bank before it closes down, asks Blart to "mind the store" briefly. Blart is thus lost in the aural jungle of video game noises when a crack team of armed robbers shut down the mall, drive out the paying customers, and seize hostages at the bank -- including Amy.


When the cops arrive, their tentative and by-the-books effort to enter the mall is quickly repulsed. The police contact Blart, tell him about the hostage situation, and urge him to join them behind a secure perimeter. As he reaches the exit, Blart espies something that forces him back inside: Amy's 1965 Ford Mustang.


Blart doesn't know exactly what he will do, but he's not about to leave Amy in the hands of the criminals. So, in violation of the Prime Directive for government police -- "officer" safety uber alles -- Blart screws up his courage to a sticking place, downs the contents of a Pixie Stick to ward off hypoglycemia, and heads back into the mall to confront the evildoers.


Not only is this a satisfying dramatic choice by the protagonist -- who at this point officially becomes a hero, whatever the outcome -- it also acts as an oblique rebuke to the familiar police approach to hostage situations: Call in the SWAT team, which will take forever establishing a "secure perimeter" while innocent, unarmed people are at the mercy of armed criminals.



















Middle-aged portly guys REPRE-SENT! In a scene straight out of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull or Quantum of Solace, the Blartster takes down a bad guy, sending the two of them crashng through a skylight and hurtling from a lethal height. (Don't worry, their fall is broken in a family-friendly way.)


After Blart decides to rescue the hostages, the film becomes a family-friendly but surprisingly tense palimpsest of Die Hard, as Blart out-thinks, out-maneuvers, and out-fights the robbers, who are a pack of feral X-athletes. "The mind is the only weapon that doesn't need a holster," Blart tells a trainee earlier in the film (who appears later in a somewhat surprising capacity). Blart's mind is whetted to a fine edge by his desire to protect something in which he was fully invested -- the task of protecting a business he valued, a woman with whom he might fall in love, and eventually his daughter, who finds herself among the hostages later in the film.


Describing the film beyond this summary would take us into spoiler territory. Suffice it to say that the third act did something I hadn't expected, and was delighted to see: It depicted the utter uselessness of the paramilitary goon squads called SWAT teams in dealing with hostage crises, and actually offered a compelling illustration of the opportunities for corruption presented by militarized law enforcement.


I will spoil one element of the ending: Offered an immediate posting to the New Jersey State Police, Blart turns down government "work" in favor of what he decided is his true calling -- protecting the businesses of the shopping mall and the people who spend their hard-earned money there.

It's true what they say about this guy: Walter Peck, the federal bureaucrat villain from Ghostbusters.


It was that final development that elevated Paul Blart: Mall Cop onto my list of vital anti-government films. That list includes Ghostbusters, whose villain, Walter Peck, was a bureaucratic eunuch employed by the EPA, and The Simpsons Movie, in which the villain is the entire federal government, as embodied by a deranged corporatist named Russ Cargill ("Sir, I'm afraid you've gone mad with power," cavils an underling, to which Cargill replies that it's boring to go mad without power, since "no one listens to you"), who heads the EPA.


In a less worthy film, Blart would have accepted a government job as a due "reward" for his heroism, thereby graduating from mere private sector work into the exalted realm of official coercion. This is the payoff for which audience expectations had been prepared -- and having the character decline it is a pretty bold statement, albeit probably an unintended one, about the superiority of commerce and private means of security and dispute-settlement.


Other delicious touches season this unexpectedly tasty cinematic offering. The swaggering, gravel-voiced SWAT commander, who shoulders everyone aside and militarizes the hostage stand-off, is revealed to be a middle-aged, unreformed High School bully -- and then something even more unsavory. Given recent scandals in New Jersey involving both corrupt and inept SWAT teams, this depiction is likely to resonate with at least some residents of the Garden State.


Hey, stay safe, guys: Heroic (ahem) SWAT operators visit a Hooter's on the way back from arduous duty in Katrina-ravaged New Orleans.


Paul Blart: Mall Cop is co-produced by Kevin James and Adam Sandler, who have a lot to atone for after inflicting I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry upon the public. They've made a solid downpayment by creating this delightful film, which is both terrifically entertaining and commendable for finding the dignity and even heroism in a private security job that is easily mocked but in principle superior to the state's alternative.


Rather than permitting the State -- the enemy of all human prosperity and social progress -- to monopolize and militarize security functions, we should be dis-establishing government police mechanisms as rapidly as possible and relying on private means (beginning with ubquitous civilian firearms ownership) to provide security for persons and property.


Alas, in the real world we're forced to inhabit, Officer Blart would either be shoved aside by, or assimilated into, some militarized monstrosity like the corporatist (which is to say fascist) police force that patrols Oakland's BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) system. The BART police earned tragic notoriety on New Year's Day owing to the unprovoked lethal shooting of Oscar Grant III, a helpless, unarmed, cooperative young man who was face-down and surrounded by police on a subway platform.

***



***

This homicide -- merely the most recent in a string of needless killings by Oakland's BART police, a "public-private police partnership" in the worst sense of the expression -- provided a horrifying reminder that the murderous tactics and official corruption common in government law enforcement quickly infect any nominally private entity seduced into such a "partnership."


Prior to the advent of cellphone cameras, The BART police had been able to cover up and dismiss four very suspicious lethal shootings. The Grant shooting, however, occurred in the YouTube age, which means that this entirely avoidable killing was added to the large and growing corpus of evidence that police today see themselves as, and behave like, an army of occupation -- and the BART police force's familiar cover-up tactics weren't successful.


Paul Blart: Mall Cop is an exercise in cinematic whimsy. But the need for our society to embrace genuinely private security arrangements is a deadly serious one: The state's armed enforcers are rapidly becoming a caste apart from, and supposedly superior to, the public they supposedly serve. Facile as it may seem to say so, it can properly be said that, where maintaining public order is concerned, we are presented with a choice between Blart and BART.


Update, 1/21 --


David Codrea, who compiles the utterly indispensable War On Guns blog, expresses understandable concerns that Paul Blart: Mall Cop is extolling the value of "unarmed protectors" and peddling the reliably lethal myth that "arms are superfluous when confronting violent evil-doers."


As indicated in the very first caption to the essay above, I do think the character of Paul Blart, the central figure in what is, after all, "an exercise in cinematic whimsy," embodies the "protect and serve" ethic, but this isn't because he's unarmed; it's because he's willing to confront the predators immediately, with whatever he can seize upon as a weapon, rather than huddling behind a heavily armed perimeter, as police generally do in hostage situations, waiting for the overkill factor to be high enough to ensure officer safety.


Firearms are vitally important in dealing with malefactors of all varieties. The most dangerous armed criminals are those employed by the state. This is why I was so struck by the fact that the Blart character actually turns down a chance to join the police (read: occupation) force at the end of the film.


While I reject civilian disarmament with every molecule of my being, I'm willing at least to chew on the notion that civic order would be improved if we were to disarm the police, at least while they're acting in an official capacity. There really is no institutional substitute for the practce of armed self-defense.


A quick personal note --

I want to thank everyone who has suggested names for the Grigg family's newest member, who is scheduled to arrive on or around February 6. Korrin and I are really stumped by this one, and we appreciate both your input and your very generous kind wishes.



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Dum spiro, pugno!

The Bipartisan Homeland Security State

For two years, Bart McIntyre was deeply involved in the insignificant, thinly populated white supremacist movement.


Though it may be difficult to believe, this actually represented something of an improvement in McIntyre's social circle, since his paying job was a position in one of our country's most repellent criminal syndicates, the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, Explosives, and Persecution of Unsanctioned Political and Religious Minorities (or ATF, for the sake of convenience).



Unsavory as their personal beliefs may be, most adherents of the white supremacist movement actually work for a living, unlike the tax-engorged parasites of the ATF. Tiny though that sub-population is, I'll bet that less than one of every 1,000 white supremacists ever commits a crime against the person or property of another human being. The core mission of the ATF, on the other hand, is to commit various kinds of aggression against gun owners and other harmless people, and the agency is indelibly tainted by its role in the 1993 mass murder at Mt. Carmel.



But this is simply the predictable fruit of a very evil tree. The ATF's progenitors were the properly despised 18th Century "Revenuers" whose haughty impositions helped precipitate the Whiskey Rebellion; the agency also played a key federal enforcement role during the demented quasi-puritanical social experiment called "Prohibition." In that role the agency's immediate ancestor was an appendage of the federal Bureau of Internal Revenue, as the IRS was known at the time.


It was only with the enactment of the Nazi-derived U.S. Gun Control Act of1968 (the German National Socialist pedigree of that measure has been capably documented by Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership) that the ATF blundered into its present role as chief persecutor of law-abiding gun owners and firearms dealers. So it was in his day job as an ATF Special Agent, rather than his part-time deployment undercover in the white supremacist milieu, that McIntyre forged his connections with those devoted to keeping Nazi ideals alive.



As he prepares to retire, McIntyre has taken the opportunity to warn that the ongoing economic collapse may re-invigorate the moribund white supremacist movement. "In society, you have a very small number of people who are going to push the envelope and take it to the next step" beyond grievance and intemperate talk and into criminal violence.



This is emerging as a standard narrative among federal law enforcement agencies: A plummeting economy + the election of a black president = a racist renaissance and a surging tide of hate crimes. The Regime's publicity arm has already treated the public to several variations on that theme, even though the evidence to support it is thin to the point of translucency.
The point of all this is not to address a plausible threat, of course, but rather to provide a the proper reductionist framing device so that any tremor of organized resistance to Obama's Neo-New Deal can be interpreted in terms of racial resentments.

















Sic semper tyrannis: ATF agents, after staging an illegal raid of a peaceful church fellowship and getting their asses kicked, retreat in shame. The Branch Davidians were within their moral and legal rights to gun down every single one of the ATF assailants, but to their considerable credit they displayed the Christian trait of mercy, permitting the criminals to gather the bodies of their dead and retrieve their wounded comrades. The Regime displayed no similar leniency in dealing with the Davidians' justified resistance, eventually immolating nearly all of them.


Give the prominence of federal informant/provocateurs among white supremacist groups it's quite likely that federal seed money is the only thing keeping that movement alive; it's simply too useful an antagonist for the Feds to permit it to die outright.


The political conquest of America by white supremacist ideology is about as likely a prospect as a winning streak by the Washington Generals. This doesn't prevent collectivists of a certain ilk -- Philip Roth being a suitably loathsome exemplar -- from peddling the notion that America must always be caught up in a foreign war or similar undertaking in order to domesticate the white population's resilient racism and direct it outward, rather than letting it coalesce into an American Reich. People preoccupied with such concerns don't object to the mechanisms of fascist rule; they simply prefer that those mechanisms be controlled by, and for the benefit of, their faction.


Ironically, or perhaps not, the incipient Obama Regime seems prepared to consolidate many of the fascist-flavored innovations of its predecessor. One very interesting illustration of this continuity is the apparent selection of Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano to serve as the next Commissar for Homeland Security.



Napolitano, who first attracted public attention in 1991 as a legal adviser to Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, is widely perceived as a mildly "progressive" Democrat. But in her career in Arizona, first as a federal attorney and then as Governor, she has displayed an uncanny ability to exploit the racially charged issue of immigration for her political advantage.



Michael Lacey, publisher of the Phoenix New Times, refers to Napolitano's career as a "cocktail of mediocrity," made up of roughly equal parts of incompetence and "rank opportunism." As a state bordering Mexico, Arizona has a very large population of immigrants, both those who arrived through legal channels and those who didn't. It also has a very large and politically organized constituency for immigration reform.



Most -- actually, nearly all -- Arizonans concerned about unchecked immigration are entirely innocent of racial prejudice. A handful are entirely consumed by it. And the state's most successful politician has ruthlessly capitalized on the issue as a way to deflect public attention from his spectacular incompetence and unvarnished corruption, and the cost those attributes have imposed on the taxpayers. The politician in question is Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who would likely be in prison were it not for a favor done long ago by Janet Napolitano.



As the elected head of the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office (MCSO), Arpaio has cultivated a media image as "America's Toughest Sheriff." He has made himself famous by creating and maintaining a county detention system in which various forms of petty belittlement -- such as forcing male inmates to wear pink underwear and eat green bologna -- are inflicted on the inmates, most of whom have yet to be convicted of an actual crime.



Both male and female detainees are forced to work on chain gangs, and those consigned to Arpaio's "Tent City" are deliberately exposed to extremes of climate, which in Arizona can mean temperatures in excess of 110 degrees. (Arpaio seems to take a perverse pleasure in making life especially difficult for female inmates: Until a federal lawsuit forced him to stop, he maintained a jail netcam broadcasting female detainees using the toilet. That fact provides a certain nauseating subtext to Arpaio's publicly expressed desire to have authorities in L.A. extradite Paris Hilton to Arizona to serve out her jail term for DUI-related offenses.)



During the past decade, while Arpaio has labored to make himself a household name, people have been dying in the custody of his deputies. Lawsuits resulting from the death of inmates at the hands of Arpaio's brown-shirted homeboys have cost the county more than $13 million in legal settlements, and a five-fold increase in insurance premiums. Last September, the National Commission on Correctional Health Care revoked its accreditation of the MCSO jails owing to Arpaio's refusal to provide adequate health care to inmates. The following month, U.S. District Judge Neal Wake (a George W. Bush appointee), ruled that the MCSO detention system violated legal standards of inmate treatment. Both the revocation and Judge Neal's ruling will probably result in additional lawsuits.


In 1996, four years after Arpaio was first elected and while Janet Napolitano served as a Clinton-appointed federal prosecutor in Arizona, a petty drug offender named Scott Norberg was attacked and beaten to death by nearly a dozen county correctional officers. Much of the lethal violence was committed while Norberg was shackled to a torture device called a "restraint chair": Bound and unable to defend himself, Norberg was beaten by the brave men of the MCSO until he died.


Arpaio didn't order the murder of Scott Norberg, but he was deeply involved in the cover-up. "Notes taken the night of the killing were destroyed," writes Phoenix New Times' Michael Lacey. "Critical X-Rays were destroyed. County authorities, under the watchful eye of the sheriff, hid the fact that Norberg's larynx was fractured." What evidence did exist was forwarded to the FBI. The Norberg family's attorney, Michael Manning, provided Napolitano -- by way of her assistant US attorneys -- with much of the evidence that had been suppressed by the MCSO.


And that's where the case died.


Before the investigation found traction, Napolitano was dismissive of Arpaio's critics, insisting that he ran "a strict jail but a safe one."

Arpaio's "progressive" ally Janet Napolitano, soon to be Commissarina of Homeland Security.

The Justice Department's final report, which was issued two years after Napolitano punted on the issue, fleshed out the skeletal term "strict" in interesting ways, noting that excessive and abusive use of force was common and often involved unjustified use of restraint chairs, hog-tying and beating of inmates, and other forms of deadly restraint.


The report likewise scored Arpaio's staffing decisions, which left the jail "below levels needed for safety and human operations." The Justice Department, as former Arizona Republic reporter Tom Zoellner pointed out in Slate, "filed suit and settled with the sheriff the same day" in exchange for promises of various reforms.


Napolitano was at Arpaio's side when the sheriff called a press conference to call the settlement a personal vindication. Napolitano, recall, had been handed clear evidence of murder committed under Arpaio's authority, and a criminal conspiracy led by his office cover up that crime; she simply threw it out and refused to prosecute.


The Sheriff would eventually reciprocate by crossing party lines to support Napolitano's subsequent politicall career, first endorsing her bi to become state attorney general and, in 2002, throwing his support to her in a gubernatorial race that was decided by a handful of votes. But this was the least Arpaio could do for the woman whose malfeasance of office not only saved his career, but probably kept him out of prison.


In 2005, Napolitano became the first governor to sign what is called a 287(g) aggreement with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) -- the component of the Homeland Security Department in charge of border enforcement. Agreements of that kind permit state and local law enforcement agencies to take the lead in border enforcement.


And this handed Arpaio a new use for his Tent City: It could now hold immigrants collected during high-profile sweeps conducted by Arpaio's office, in which people of Mexican ancestry -- citizens, legal residents, and illegal immigrants alike -- are subject to pretext stops and searches by MCSO deputies. These anti-immigrant sweeps are hugely popular with a large segment of Arizona's electorate. It's likely that the popularity of the sweeps would suffer somewhat were the public adequately informed of one very troubling cost incurred by them.


Overkill, cubed: Some of Arpaio's arsenal (left, and below right).



A recent study by the Goldwater Institute entitled "Mission Unaccomplished: The Misplaced Priorities of the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office" documents that Arpaio's project of turning the MCSO into an immigration control agency has effectively crippled it as a law enforcement entity.


"MCSO's massive diversion of resources into policing illegal immigration ... coincides with growing rates of violent crimes, plummeting arrest rates, and increased response time to citizens' calls for help," notes the report. "At the same time, [an investigation done by the Arizona Republic newspaper] found that crime rates in areas that were the subject of saturation [immigration] raids were largely unchanged after the sweeps."


Arpaio's office is the depository for all warrants issued to law-enforcement agencies in Maricopa County. As of September 2008, 77,949 warrants were outstanding, including 42,297 felony warrants. Many, perhaps most, of the felony charges dealt with violent crimes against persons and property.

The soi-disant "toughest sheriff" in the land boldly sends his deputies to drag Mexican mothers from their cars while their children scream in terror, and deploys paramilitary units to seize janitors fromwhile their children scream in terror, or their jobs at Mesa City Library or City Hall.


Meanwhile, actual violent criminals remain free and the crime rate continues to climb -- and Arpaio capitalizes on that latter fact by describing it as a product of unrestricted immigration, rather than a reflection of his own politically opportunistic priorities.


Two recent developments prompted Arpaio to discover, however tardily, the merit of enforcing felony warrants. The first was Napolitano's grudging decision to withhold some state funding from the MCSO until something was done to address the backlog of outstanding warrants. The second was the development of a "reality television program" featuring the MCSO entitled "Smile! You're Under Arrest."


The program -- a product the Fox network, natch -- features people subject to felony warrants (involving non-violent offenses for the most part) being "punk'd" through elaborate on-camera ruses before being arrested. The process is long, expensive, needlessly complicated, and self-indulgent. To Arpaio, an insatiable publicity whore who cannot resist an opportunity to thrust his unsightly mug in front of a camera, the opportunity to star in his own television show outweighed any practical liabilities.


Endlessly vain and incurably power-intoxicated, Arpaio doesn't venture out in public without being surrounded by a phalanx of grim-faced bodyguards. This is supposedly made necessary because of purported death threats received by the sherriff, at least one of which was a "bomb threat" that was actually contrived by the Sheriff's Office itself.


In October 2007, Arpaio sent his Selective Enforcement Unit to arrest Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin, the owners of the Phoenix New Times, which has produced a steady stream of critical stories examining the sheriff's empire of authoritarian corruption. Lacey and Larkin were charged with publicizing secret grand jury proceedings by publicizing a subponea they had received from the local prosecutor, a priggish authoritarian and Arpaio ally named Andrew Thomas, that demanded, inter alia, "Every note, tape, and record from every story written about Sheriff Arpaio by every reporter over a period of years" as well as "detailed information on anyone who has looked at the New Times Web site since 2004" as well as every individual "individual who looked at any story, review, listing, classified, or retail ad [in the publication] over a period of years."


All of this was part of a campaign of official harassment and intimidation provoked by a New Times investigation into Arpaio's personal real estate holdings. One story published by the paper gave Arpaio's home address, thereby supposedly posing "a serious and imminent threat" to his personal safety. The charges against Lacey and Larkin were dropped, and the New Times is pursuing a lawsuit against the rogue sheriff and his ally in the County Prosecutor's office.



Arpaio continues to use the powers of his office to punish and intmidate his critics, whether this involves threatening to arrest reporters for seeking public records about the MCSO or arresting citizens who politely applaud his critics during meetings of the County Board of Supervisors. (People who applauded other speakers at the same event were left unmolested by Arpaio's minions.) Arpaio's preferred tactic is to file "disorderly conduct" charges against people who confront or criticize him or his office; in fact, he's been captured on video trying to provoke a citizen into some act, gesture, or vocal inflection that could be construed as "disorderly":

*** ***


Just as "progressives" of a certain kind support the exercise of draconian powers against "hate criminals" and peaceful gun owners, conservatives of the Hannity/Savage/Beck variety regard Arpaio to be something of a folk hero. Oh, sure, he's a bit uncouth, they'll admit; he lacks rudimentary social graces and looks as if he combs his hair with buttered toast -- but at least he's doing something to battle the Brown Peril.


There is something of a dialectic at work in the consolidation of the Homeland Security apparatus. During the Clinton era, the embryonic Homeland Security Department focused most of its attention on "home-grown" extremists; this had the useful effect of provoking conservative concerns about due process, the Bill of Rights, and abuses of government power.


During Duhbya's reign, the focus has been on the dreaded "other" -- particularly Muslims and dusky-skinned immigrants from south of the border. This catalyzed resistance among left-leaning civil liberties groups, even as most of the conservative movement embraced many of the same measures they found intolerable under Clinton.


Now, in the name of bipartisanship and national unity under the rule of the Sainted One, even His Holiness Barack Obama, we're likely to see a synthesis of the worst elements from both the Bush and Clinton eras.


As Attorney General, Eric Holder, an unabashed proponent of civilian disarmament and the prosecution of "hate crimes," we can expect to see the ATF will let off its leash and a cascade of federal initiatives targeting "hate groups."


Under Commissarina Napolitano, the Homeland Security Department will continue to militarize and federalize law enforcement, cultivating ties with Joe Arpaio wannabes nation-wide and turning them into squalid little satellite despotisms in the service of Washington. (Incidentally, like Arpaio, the Homeland Security Department now has its own television show.)


Although it is almost certainly too much to hope for, but it would be a substantial blessing were a bipartisan -- or, better yet, trans-partisan -- synthesis to emerge among opponents of government power, with conservatives taking alarm over police state measures being used to enforce immigration laws and liberals loudly defending the rights of the rural gunowners Obama has referred to so contemptuously. What is necessary is for people to decide that they love liberty more than they despise their political enemies, which is a direct reversal of the way politics almost always operates.


A personal note --

I wish to apologize, yet again, for another unscheduled hiatus. Everybody in my house has been sick, myself included.


Korrin, as many of you have learned, is expecting again, a blessed circumstance complicated somewhat by her long-term chronic health problems. Both mother and baby are doing well, but are in need of an exceptional level of paternal attention. That, plus Isaiah's appendicitis scare (it turned out to be something else), plus my own ongoing bout of the flu, have kept me occupied away from my keyboard.


To those who noted the oblique announcement in the header to this blog, and offered congratulations, I extend sincere thanks. The new member of the Grigg Clan will arrive on the third of next month; he's a boy, and we're always open for those who wish to suggest what to name him.



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Dum spiro, pugno!

Seeking Clemency from a War Criminal: The Case of Evan Vela Carnahan

George W. BUSH: One of the major theaters against al Qaeda turns out to have been Iraq. This is where al Qaeda said they were going to take their stand. This is where al Qaeda was hoping to take– Martha RADDATZ: But not until after the U.S. invaded. BUSH: Yeah, that’s right. So what?


President Bush's interview on ABC News in Baghdad, December 15.





Sgt. Evan Vela Carnahan, 25, has served roughly one year of a ten-year sentence at the Ft. Leavenworth Military Prison. In November 2007, he was convicted of murdering an Iraqi civilian named Genei Nasir Khudair al-Janabi, whom he killed with a single shot to the head from a 9mm sidearm.


The killing took place just a few hundred feet from Janabi's home, which is located in a Sunni-dominated neighborhood in Baghdad near Iskandariyah in a region sometimes called the "Triangle of Death." Evan admits that he killed Janabi in compliance with a direct order issued by his squad leader. The squad leader -- who was acquitted of a murder charge -- admits that he gave the order, and stated under oath that he would have killed Janabi himself except for the fact that Evan was the one with the pistol in his hand.


During the past six years, the Bush Regime has followed an inverted Nuremberg formula -- call it the "Abu Ghraib Doctrine" -- under which the legal accountability for war crimes resides only with those at the bottom of the chain of command. To palliate public opinion in Iraq, a handful of low-ranking soldiers were sent to prison after the Abu Ghraib atrocities were made public.


Evan Carnahan was sent to prison for much the same reason: The killing of Janabi, which took place on May 11, 2007, came just as the much-heralded "surge" began, a program in which U.S. occupation commanders pacified the Sunni Triangle by bribing the leaders of the Sunni insurgency.


Curtis Carnahan, Evan's father (and a close personal friend of mine from High School), told Pro Libertate that "the Iraqi Human Rights Minister was present at every session of Evan's military trial, which the Army insisted on holding in Baghdad.... The trial didn't begin until November [of 2007], after Evan's unit had returned to Alaska. They could have brought Evan back to the United States, and we repeatedly filed motions to have the trial moved stateside. Instead, the Army, at great unnecessary expense, held the trial in Iraq, under the constant scrutiny of Iraqi officials. It's clear to me that Evan was being used as a scapegoat, as a political sacrifice, in order to appease Iraqi government officials."



Evan was part of a five-man sniper team that had implanted itself in a "hide" behind an earthen berm. Over the previous four days the team had been able to sleep no more than 3-4 hours during each 24-hour cycle, and what sleep they had was divided into fifteen-minute segments. This was typical of the 56 missions Evan's team had carried out under Staff Sergeant Michael A. Hensley, an Expert Marksman tasked to increase the "kill rate" of suspected "insurgents" in the area.


Hensley -- described in an Esquire story as a twitchy, tatooed collection of eccentric mannerisms and nihilistic opinions -- was one of the most proficient snipers in the U.S. Army, a "natural-born killer."


Evan was adopted by Curtis (who runs a printing business in eastern Idaho) as a child. The Army insists on calling him Sgt. Vela because of a clerical matter involving his Social Security Card. He was, by all accounts, an exemplary soldier who did not check his conscience at the door when he left for combat.


Before shipping out for Iraq, Evan expressed his ambivalence about killing Iraqis to his LDS (Mormon) Bishop. The spiritual counsel he received, as encapsulated in a videotape prepared by church authorities, was that he would not be held accountable by God for shedding the blood of Iraqis as long as he went to war "in a spirit of love."


This is anodyne advice of no practical or moral value in a war of aggression in which every U.S. soldier who kills in self-defense is actually committing murder. Since the U.S. government had no moral right or legal authority to invade Iraq, U.S. military personnel in that country are the equivalent of robbers suddenly confronted by an armed homeowner: A robber in that situation has no right to defend himself by force.


This isn't to say that every American serviceman in Iraq intended to behave like an armed robber, or that they deserve to be killed. It is to say that they shouldn't have been sent there in the first place, and that justice requires not only that we totally withdraw from Iraq but also prosecute and punish of those responsible for planning and ordering the invasion.


Evan's case offers a particularly poignant example of the multi-layered injustices that have blossomed from the Bushling's unnecessary war.


Early on the morning of May 11, Evan -- who had been assigned guard duty, but (given his human limitations) inevitably found himself dozing off -- awoke to find himself staring into the startled face of Genei al-Janabi, who had stumbled onto the sniper squad's "hide" on his way to fetch water. The squad soon awoke, and Janabi was taken prisoner. Shortly thereafter, Janabi's teenage son materialized and was likewise taken into custody.


Hensley now confronted a predicament. His squad had been sent to ferret out suspected insurgents in what was, at the time, a very active battle zone. Their position had been compromised, and the elder Janabi, understandably terrified, began to thrash and cry out for help. Helmsley decided to release the son. As soon as the teenager had departed, Hensley turned to Evan and ordered him to kill Janabi. Evan did as he was ordered.


Immediately thereafter, Hensley ordered the squad to plant an AK-47 on Janabi's dead body. He also began to concoct cover story; this involved multiple spurious radio calls to Lt. Matthew Didier at the squad's patrol base describing concerns about a suspected insurgent and requesting permission to kill him.


The killing of Janabi, Hensley later explained, "is legitimate to me; it's not legitimate to the law. So I [had] two choices. I can do something illegal, like put a gun on him, or I can go to jail for murder. I don't know where you stand ethically on all of that, but that is what it is. And if doing something that is a little dishonest keeps me and my men from going to jail one day, I am going to be a little dishonest. If the law causes my men to get killed, the law will be broken. If lying prevents me from going to jail, I'm going to lie."


Al-Janabi, Hensley insisted, had to die because he was "making too much f*****g noise" and thus imperiled the lives of his men. As a field commander, Hensley decided that the Iraqi, who was in his own neighborhood, looking for water on his own property, "had no right to be there, he was a bad guy, he deserved to die."


So he ordered Evan Carnahan to shoot the man in the head. And Carnahan, trained by the military to obey reflexively, and taught by his church leaders that obedience to authority expunges the taint of criminal actions, pulled the trigger, believing that his action was legally sound and morally right.


After the Sunni Buy-Out -- aka "Surge" -- began, the shooting of Janabi became a local political controversy, and the Army sicced the Criminal Investigative Division on Hensley and his squad. Hensley, whose conscience is as flexible as a Cirque du Soleil performer, brazened out the interrogation.


Evan broke down under questioning. He was offered immunity to testify against Specialist Jorge Sandoval and S. Sgt. Hensley. Both Sandoval and Hensley were acquitted of murder and convicted of lesser offenses. Both of them were given sentences equivalent to time already served in pre-trial detention.


Despite his immunity agreement, Evan was brought to trial. Hensley -- who, having been acquitted of murder, had nothing to lose -- testified on Evan's behalf. He eagerly, perhaps even giddily, admitted to being the instigator of Janabi's death, describing Evan's role as merely that of carrying out what the soldier believed to be a lawful order.


Curtis Carnahan, who made three long, expensive trips to Baghdad for Evan's pre-trial hearings and criminal trial, told me that the eight-member trial panel who heard the case "was hand-picked by General Rick Lynch," the appropriately surnamed commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, whom Carnahan describes as "a smug, narcissistic son-of-a-bitch." Lynch's priority at the time was to placate Iraqi officials. This was necessary, in turn, to ensure the "success" of the "Surge," which itself was intended to neutralize growing American antipathy toward the war.


Given all of these considerations, someone had to be fed to the wolves, and Evan happened to be the only suitable candidate.


A Father seeks justice: Curtis Carnahan (right) during one of his trips to Baghdad on behalf of his son, Evan.



According to Curtis, the Army had a file on Janabi suggesting that "he was a bad guy. And several people with detailed knowledge of the region have developed intelligence confirming that the al-Janabi tribe was either active in al-Qaeda, or collaborating with them."


Of course, just days after Janabi was killed, collaborating with suspected al-Qaeda operatives became official U.S. military policy in Iskandiriyah. It's also worth recalling the exchange quoted in the epigram above, in which George W. Bush, when confronted with the charge that it was his invasion and occupation of Iraq that resulted in Iraq becoming infested with al-Qaeda, replied: "So what?"


Bush infused those two syllables with his proprietary blend of bellicose ignorance and arrogant dismissiveness. Yes, he was admitting, the invasion created a morass of guerilla violence and a breeding ground for terrorism where none previously existed -- but that's not important. The implicit question is: If this isn't important -- if there were no WMDs, and the invasion actually enhanced the terrorist threat -- why did the U.S. invade Iraq?


An observation offered Curtis Carnahan is suggestive of an answer.


"Everything I saw while I was over there suggests that they're not going to pull out," Curtis told me. "There was construction going on everywhere -- more buildings, more concrete, more everything at Camps Victory and Liberty. They're definitely settling in for a long haul."


This underscores the fact that the invasion and occupation of Iraq was pure military colonialism. It wasn't intended to "liberate" a country long ruled by a U.S.-installed surrogate thug, much less to protect the United States and its inhabitants from any "threat" posed by that tiny, insignificant country. The objective was always to seize control over Iraq and use it as a staging base to assert military and political control over the region's energy resources -- an objective that will be followed irrespective of the new agreement with "independent" Iraq.


Curtis, as I mentioned earlier, is an old friend of mine (he was, in fact, my vice president when I was president of the Madison High School Class of 1981). He sees the war in starkly different terms than I do, insisting that the correct approach is to "cut off their heads and crush them -- we should be acting like a conquering army, forcing them to submit to our will." Like many other people I know, including many I love and respect, he doesn't appear troubled by the prospect of living under a government capable of exercising powers of the sort he describes. But due to what his son has experienced, Curtis does have a better understanding of the incurable corruption that infects every element of the Regime that rules us.


















She's not saying "Bush is Number One!" Evan Carnahan's sister, during a visit to Mordor, expresses her opinion of George W. Bush and the Regime he briefly ruled. (Photo courtesy of Curtis Carnahan.)


To justify an act of murder, Hensley fixed the "facts" around his decision to justify the killing. This was perfectly in harmony with the conduct of his Commander-in-Chief. When that decision created a local public relations problem, the soldier who pulled the trigger was offered as a sacrifice to political expediency; this, too, is perfectly in accord with Mr. Bush's priorities.


Among the clear lessons taught by this abhorrent case is this: Those who understand and cherish individual liberty should never allow themselves to become the agents of another person's will.


Evan Carnahan is merely one of countless thousands of fundamentally decent Americans whose earnest patriotism led them to participate in a world-historic crime. Unlike most of them, however, Evan is now in prison while those who used him to carry out that crime are free -- and his only hope for freedom, at present, is an act of clemency from the War Criminal in the White House.




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Dum spiro, pugno!