Blood On Their Hands

The federal "hate crimes" measure recently signed into "law" by Barack Obama will do nothing to protect innocent people from criminal violence. But thanks to the cynical pressure group politics that led to passage of that measure, thousands of innocent people will certainly die.

Working with its congressional allies, the White House attached the hate crimes measure as an amendment to the most recent military spending measure, a $680 billion appropriation that contains at least $120 billion to fund the ongoing slaughter in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The brutally honest Chris Hedges describes how this arrangement managed to unite advocates of tyrannical "tolerance" on the home front with those who promote the mass murder of harmless foreigners abroad:

"It was a clever piece of marketing. It blunted debate about new funding for war. And behind the closed doors of the caucus rooms, the Democratic leadership told Blue Dog Democrats, who are squeamish about defending gays or lesbians from hate crimes, that they could justify the vote as support for the war. They told liberal Democrats, who are squeamish about unlimited funding for war, that they could defend the vote as a step forward in the battle for civil rights. Gender equality groups, by selfishly narrowing their concern to themselves, participated in the dirty game."

The price of "tolerance": An Afghan child displays the burns inflicted by a NATO bombing (left); other "liberated" Afghans and Iraqis are seen below. Hundreds or thousands of additional victims will die thanks to the political deal that brought about the new hate crimes law.


Granted, it isn't likely that the Pentagon appropriation, including the war funding, would have been defeated.


The difference between this measure and its predecessors is this: The leading elements of the "hate industry" -- those sanctimonious scolds who make a handsome living tutoring the rest of us in the ways of "tolerance" -- are now directly implicated in the avoidable mass murder of innocent people in the Near East.

For the squalid collection of pressure groups that promoted passage of the hate crimes measure, -- the so-called Anti-Defamation League, the self-styled Human Rights Campaign, the fraudulently named Southern Poverty Law Center, et. al. -- this is an entirely acceptable arrangement. Their fund-raising will prosper; their stature in Washington will continue to grow; their influence over law enforcement will expand; most importantly, the power of the state to persecute their political enemies will be significantly enhanced.

Oh, sure -- the political trade-off behind this "victory" means that poor brown people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq will suffer violent death in their homes, streets, and houses of worship, cultivating understandable anti-American hatred that will yield a bloody harvest of terrorism and unending war.

But, hey, aren't we talking about religion-obsessed, hetero-patriarchal homophobes, anyway? Wouldn't the world be better off if we were to be rid of such intolerant people?

Through its involvement in the political deal that led to passage of the hate crimes bill, the Hate Industry (aka the Tolerance Lobby) took an ownership interest in the regime's wars of aggression abroad.

Those running that Lobby are certainly smart enough to have realized this. The moral calculus behind that trade-off must be similar to the self-serving calculations of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment: Since there is a certain sacrificial "percentage" of people who are fated to die each year to serve society's "greater" interests, why scruple over the death of a single unpleasant, greedy old woman -- or several thousand innocent Afghans, Pakistanis, or Iraqis? And wouldn't there be something redemptive in using that horrible war to do something to advance the cause of "tolerance" here?

The hate crimes legislation signed by Obama on October 28 bore the names of James Byrd and Matthew Shephard, murder victims whose assailants were found, prosecuted, and punished very efficiently without the dubious benefit of a federal "hate crimes" statute. There is no shortage of laws dealing with criminal violence against innocent people. But purposes served by "hate crimes" laws have nothing to do with protecting the innocent.

"Hate crimes" statutes invert the priorities described by Justice Felix Frankfurter (in a moment of atypical wisdom): "Law is concerned with external behavior and not the inner life of man." By enhancing the penalty for criminal acts either provably or putatively rooted in certain proscribed attitudes, "hate crimes" statutes impermissibly assert the government's jurisdiction over the inner life of individuals. This is, in principle, an assertion of totalitarian power.

The newly enacted hate crimes measure also expands the assault on what remains of federalism. During that brief and fondly remembered period during which the U.S. Constitution was recognized as the "law of the land," it was understood that whatever police powers could properly be exercised were (with very few specific exceptions) entirely within the purview of the individual states.

Briefly indulging the winsome fantasy that the Constitution is in some way relevant to the actions of the government ruling us, we dust off Federalist #45 in which Madison, the primary author of the Constitution, explained that the "few and defined" powers of the federal government do not include a general police power (as the Lopez ruling reminded us a few years ago).

"Did you take offense over an opinion, an unfriendly look, a politically incorrect bumper sticker or t-shirt inscription? Give us a call!"

By way of contrast, the "numerous and indefinite" powers reserved to the states "extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people" as well as matters of "internal order" -- that is, police power dealing with the protection of life, limb, and property.

There are myriad sound reasons why states shouldn't enact hate crimes laws, but they're constitutionally free to do so. The newly enacted federal measure, on the other hand, is facially incompatible with the assignment of powers described by Madison and required by the 10th Amendment precisely because it would permit federal intervention in criminal matters that fall entirely within the innate jurisdiction of the states.

That jurisdictional arrangement can be changed, of course -- through a constitutional amendment. That not being the case here, there are ample legitimate grounds for state governments to nullify the new federal hate crimes measure. Ironically, one of the arguments used by the measure's supporters actually amounts to what could be called "nullification in reverse."

The new hate crimes "law" provides for an end-run around the Constitution's prohibition of double jeopardy, thereby encouraging federal prosecution of people either acquitted by local courts, or charged with offenses other than "hate crimes."

Defenders of this approach insist that this is "necessary" because some local jurisdictions are fetid pools of bigotry, thereby creating the prospect of jury nullification on the basis of racial or other prejudice. They say that this approach is constitutionally appropriate because of the "dual sovereignty" relationship between states and the federal government.

Bear in mind that this argument comes from the lips and keyboards of left-collectivists who ordinarily regard any reference, however oblique, to state "sovereignty" as covert code for segregation or other offenses against "tolerance."


Tearing away the gauze of sophistry in which they've been swaddled, "dual sovereignty" prosecutions are substantively indistinguishable from double jeopardy. They also tend to be dictated by considerations extraneous to individual justice -- such as race-based interest group politics.


To understand how the "dual sovereignty" doctrine operates in practice, consider this contrast: After being acquitted of criminal charges by a local jury, the four police officers who beat Rodney King were subjected to a federal "civil rights" trial for the same offense, based on the same facts; two of them were convicted. However, when O.J. Simpson was acquitted of murder in what many regarded as a race-based act of jury nullification, he was not subjected to a "dual sovereignty" civil rights or hate crime prosecution.


But this sort of thing is to be expected of a system in which "justice" is a function of belonging to a government-protected collective. That's the vision being inflicted on our society through the new "hate crimes" law, a progressive victory purchased for the paltry cost of $120 billion to kill helpless foreigners.


Such a deal!

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Dum spiro, pugno!

Obama and the "Predator Left"

Dear Leader: The 2009 version.


Many ancient societies were ruled by a figure regarded as a divine emperor-king, a transcendent figure whose goodness and power not only protected his subjects from harm, but also made the rains descend, the fields fertile, and the kingdom prosperous.


Modern Americans are too sophisticated for such primitive nonsense. Rather than a divine emperor-king, they have a "Commander-in-Chief" who holds the teeming terrorist masses at bay, labors to "heal the planet," and dispenses wealth in great compassionate abundance on desperate, otherwise hopeless people.


See? Those are two completely different concepts.


Dear Leader: The 2003 version.


Whatever the powers attributed to him by his minions and worshipers, Barack Obama is the first politician to be seriously recognized as the "President of Planet Earth." In any case, that's the title given to him by Howard Fineman in a Newsweek column that was less a work of opinion journalism than the printed equivalent of a prolonged fit of public rectal osculation.


"Obama isn't going to be sworn in as planetary president. But it doesn't matter; in his mind, he already is," grovels Fineman, who -- it must be clear -- offered that view approvingly. "In office for a mere nine months, Obama is now a full-blown `ism.'"


As defined by Fineman, "Obamaism" is " the idea that there must be shared global responsibility for virtually every problem we face." By his reckoning, the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Obama was less an individual commendation as it was a ratification of the "ism" Obama supposedly embodies.

Dear Leader: The 1940 version.

A more rational definition of "Obamaism" would describe it as a pathology, rather than an ideology. It is an alloy of impervious credulity and militant leader-worship that reveals itself in the tendency to invest one's hopes in a figure who supposedly embodies hope and change.


Obama isn't the first ruler coughed up by a dying imperial power to be embraced as this kind of transcendent global figure: That distinction goes to a previous Nobel Peace Prize winner, Mikhail Gorbachev.


As part of a "press gaggle" that interviewed Gorbachev prior to a speech at the Appleton, Wisconsin Performing Arts Center several years ago, I was struck by what an utterly unremarkable individual he is. That apparently wasn't a majority opinion. As he introduced Gorbachev prior to his long, tedious, and forgettable address, Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle -- an Irish Catholic-- gushed that meeting Gorbachev was a greater honor than being presented to the Pope.


The lasting impression I took away was that Gorby had all the charisma and eloquence of a minor municipal bureaucrat -- or, perhaps, an otherwise insignificant foundation-funded "community organizer" deprived of his teleprompter and the trappings of "institutionalized awe."


It's worth remembering that when Gorbachev was first embraced as a species of savior by the international bien-pensant class, he -- like Obama -- was presiding over a brutal and senseless military occupation of Afghanistan.


Rather than pulling Soviet troops out of Afghanistan, the Soviet regime under Gorbachev actually escalated the conflict, to the point (some believe) of assassinating the leader of neighboring Pakistan, Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, who had collaborated with the CIA in arming and supporting the Afghan rebels. By delaying Soviet withdrawal until January 1989, Gorbachev's government managed to kill tens of thousands of people -- Afghan and Pakistani, as well as Russians and troops provided as part of Moscow's "coalition of the willing" -- in what amounts to nothing more than a futile attempt to save face.


The oligarchy fronted by Obama is pursuing a similar course in a much bloodier fashion. After Obama inherited the imperial purple last January, Washington radically expanded the use of unmanned Predator drones to attack suspected terrorists in Pakistan.


Jane Meyer of The New Yorker magazine, who recently published an account of Washington's "remote-control war" in Pakistan, cheerfully reports that those strikes, carried out on Obama's instructions, have "killed more than half of the twenty most wanted Al Qaeda terrorist suspects"; that's the "good news." The bad news is that this escalation has "also killed hundreds of civilians" -- a remarkably high level of "collateral damage" in exchange for perhaps a dozen successful strikes against suspected terrorists, who (let's not forget) were themselves the subject of execution by presidential decree.


Despite her talents as a reporter, Meyer is unmistakably a product of the imperial capital's journalistic culture. Thus while she expresses sympathy for the battle trauma suffered by button-pushing executioners who kill people in Pakistan from the comfort of an office in Langley, Virginia, she spares little sympathy for the victims. Her only candidly expressed worry is that the deaths of innocent Pakistanis might present a strategic complication for imperial war-planners.

"What is astonishing about [Meyer's remarks]," comments the indispensable Chris Floyd, is the absence of anything resembling "a roar of outrage from Mayer and her interviewer: `They've killed hundreds of civilians!' Hundreds of Pakistani civilians, men, women and children with no involvement whatsoever in war or terrorism; just ordinary people living their lives as best they can -- just like your neighbor, just like your mother, just like you...or just like the people killed on September 11, whose deaths are used as an eternal justification for war and bloodshed on a global scale by the American state."

"But these drone-murdered Pakistanis -- these human beings, these fathers and mothers, these grandparents, these toddlers, these brothers and sisters -- their lives are just statistics to be coldly weighed in the calibrations of imperial policy," summarizes Floyd. "The `bad news' about their deaths is not that they were murdered, not that these utterly defenseless men, women and children were blown to shreds without warning, without the slightest chance of escape, by flying robots controlled by unseen hands a world away; no, the `bad news' is that these that these killing might possibly hamper America's "counterinsurgency program...."


Nor is this the only way that Obama the Blessed is escalating the war.


The CIA is not the only agency being permitted to liquidate "terrorist suspects" with extreme prejudice; the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Agency's diseased sibling, has gotten into the act as well.



Some fifty "nexus figures" described as Afghan drug traffickers are among the 367 people on the regime's "kill or capture list," reports the New York Times. This probably explains why three DEA agents were among the casualties when a U.S. helicopter went down following a firefight in a village in Afghanistan's Qadis district.


So, as Obama and his handlers escalate the war(s) in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where is the putatively anti-war Left?


Well, many of them can be found hurling jingoistic invective at those who dare criticize the "Commander-in-Chief" during a "time of war."


For its part, the nationalist Right is desperately clinging to the fiction that Obama is a "pacifist" of some variety, and that there's nothing wrong with the war(s) in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and elsewhere that a military putsch at home couldn't cure. Accordingly, we can expect to see Obama's supporters defending everything he does -- no matter how bellicose or bloody -- as a tactical necessity to protect him from the militaristic "hardliners" who seek to depose him.


Such are the quasi-Soviet politics of the American Imperium as it approaches its terminal phase.



A useful reminder: The bold and principled Dr. Katherine Albrecht, a full-spectrum freedom activist, brings up a much-neglected fact during a peace protest just prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.


Russian-born Canadian citizen Nikolai Lanine, who served in Afghanista, can see tragic continuities between the Soviet Empire's futile occupation of that country and the one undertaken by Imperial Washington. Canadians are well-represented among the victims of Washington's war in Afghanistan, and Lanine can't help but be reminded of his own experiences in Moscow's "noble" war to "liberate" the Afghans.


"I went to Afghanistan believing in `fighting terrorism' and 'liberating Afghans,'" wrote Lanine in the Toronto Globe and Mail a couple of years ago. "In my mind, our presence was `helping Afghans,' particularly with educating women and children. My combat unit participated in `humanitarian aid' -- accompanying doctors and delivering food, fuel, clothing, and school and other supplies to Afghan villages. It was only later that I began to wonder: Did that aid justify our aggression?"


Lanine recalls how Moscow's servants, like those sent on Washington's killing errand, dehumanized the victims of military aggression:


"It is hard to kill people without demonizing them. In 1988, my unit accidentally hit an Afghan wedding party. My friend, whose mortar shell had killed innocent people, was shocked when he learned of it. Some soldiers, however, were indifferent. `That village supports the resistance, anyway,' they said. Like NATO now, we didn't count `their' casualties. As another friend, Alexander, would later write: `We thought that all of them -- old and young -- were insurgents.'"


By the time the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, the implosion of Moscow's empire was underway. Freed from the distraction of a pointless war, the Soviet nomenklatura focused on a more important task: Setting itself up as the permanent economic ruling class. By the time the Hammer and Sickle was furled in December 1991, everything of value in Russia and its "near abroad" was firmly in the hands of the oligarchs.

Scenes from Obama's America: Riot police at the Pittsburgh G-20 summit deploy the Long-Range Acoustic Device (LRAD), a crowd-control weapon first used as part of the Iraq occupation.


Exactly the same process is underway here in the united State.


Appropriately enough, the consolidation of economic power in the hands of our ruling oligarchy began with a March 2008 meeting in Moscow between Commissar Hank Paulson and the Goldman Sachs board of directors. Shortly thereafter, the controlled demolition of the financial sector began, with secretive and powerful interests deliberately clearing the way for an unprecedented consolidation of political and economic power -- and profiting handsomely from the carnage.


Winsome and appealing as many find him, Obama is the willing and witting figurehead of this insatiable oligarchy -- a ruling elite at least as depraved and bloody-handed as its Soviet predecessors. He is indecently eager to do its bidding, whether that entails murdering hundreds of innocent Pakistanis through Predator strikes, or unleashing paramilitary violence against peaceful demonstrators (and pedestrians) in Pittsburgh during the recent G-20 summit.


Among the few principled commentators on the left who see Obama for what he is can be found former war correspondent Chris Hedges, who has consistently condemned the warfare state under both Republican and Democratic management.


"The right-wing accusations against Barack Obama are true," writes Hedges. "He is a socialist, although he practices socialism for corporations. He is squandering the country’s future with deficits that can never be repaid. He has retained and even bolstered our surveillance state to spy on Americans. He is forcing us to buy into a health care system that will enrich corporations and expand the abuse of our for-profit medical care. He will not stanch unemployment. He will not end our wars. He will not rebuild the nation. He is a tool of the corporate state." (Emphasis added.)

Yes, they can use them at home, too: Bush the Dumber inspects a Predator Drone -- the same robot aircraft used to kill suspected terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan -- used by the Department of Homeland Security to patrol the U.S. border.


Another honorable voice of opposition comes from commentator/cartoonist Ted Rall, who points out that Obama has not repudiated the central tenet of the Bush-Cheney doctrine of executive power -- namely, the claim that a president can order the detention, torture, or summary execution of anyone, anywhere, for any reason.


"Obama has ramped up the assassination of political opponents of the U.S. and the U.S.-aligned authoritarian regime in Pakistan, deploying more Predator drone attacks than Bush," Rall points out to the Dear Leader's leftist worshipers. "But that's just for now. Obama could still personally order a government agency to murder you. Which is weird. But not nearly as weird as the fact that you probably don't care enough to do something about it."


Actually, Obama's constituency -- call it the "Predator Left" -- is delighted that its Dear Leader controls the machinery of arbitrary mass murder. After all, there are "reactionary" eggs to be cracked and progressive omelets to be made, and how can that be done unless the world's largest egg-beater is firmly held by politically correct hands?


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Dum spiro, pugno!

End the Occupation: A Mission for the Oath-Keepers

One Nation, under Occupation: Police departments nation-wide are acting as if this were a conquered country, and as if citizens were "enemy combatants."



A thin blanket of early evening darkness had draped itself across Alex Locklear's home in Maxton, North Carolina when the armed intruders arrived.


Brandishing firearms, the invaders forced several people -- including wheelchair-bound Nicholas Locklear and a pregnant woman -- to the ground and then barged in through the rear door, threatening to "blow the brains" out of anyone who put up a struggle. One woman was so terrified that she fled, tripped over an unseen obstruction, and broke her arm.


The arrival of an unmarked police car with its blue running lights flashing must have provided the victims of the home invasion with a moment's relief. But that relief would have quickly turned to a different flavor of alarm when the victims realized that their assailants were the police.


Under the pretext of a drug search, the five-man robbery crew ransacked the Locklear home in search of large amounts of cash that could be "forfeited" -- that is, stolen -- as alleged drug proceeds. The robbers had to be content with the $200 they found in Alex Locklear's bedroom, which is all they could put their hands on before piling into the police car and pulling away with such reckless haste that the vehicle shed one of its front hubcaps.


Locklear, who returned shortly after the robbery, reported the crime to the Robeson County Sheriff's Office, giving descriptions of the assailants and their vehicle. Not surprisingly, the Sheriff didn't follow up on that solid lead, because the robbery had been spearheaded by Robeson County Deputy Sheriff Vincent Sinclair, a member of the department's drug enforcement unit.


The March 14, 2004 robbery most likely came about because the Sheriff's Department discovered that Locklear had cashed a large check to pay workers on his 400-acre farm before heading for a motorcycle rally in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. And that assault differed only in detail from similar outrages taking place every single day in the purported Land of the Free.


The chances are pretty good that as you read these words, paramilitary attacks -- commonly described as "no-knock raids" -- are either being planned or executed somewhere in the U.S. Typically carried out by the military units called SWAT or tactical teams, those raids are generally triggered by a tip from a "confidential informant" -- a paid snitch -- and subsidized with federal funds, often through the "Justice" Department's Byrne Grant program.


Ironically, those on the receiving end of such "authorized" assaults are often treated even worse than the victims of the raid on the Locklear home.




No recourse: Last August, a SWAT team in Anderson, Indiana destroyed Barbara Williams' home in a mistaken armed raid. According to the city attorney, since the assault was "legal," the city is not liable for the damages, and the now-homeless Mrs. Williams is just S.O.L.



When property is damaged or innocent people are injured or killed in the course of an "authorized" home invasion, police can generally expect to be held blameless, since any action they perceive as a potential threat supposedly justifies the use of deadly force.


Witness the case of 22-year-old Houston resident Pedro Oregon Navarro, who was murdered by police who invaded his family's home in a mistaken "no-knock" raid. Navarro, who had armed himself with a handgun to deal with belligerent intruders he didn't know were police, was shot twelve times.


According to Harris County District Attorney John B. Holmes, Jr., the violent death of Navarro at the hands of the police was not a crime, because "the law does not allow anyone to resist arrest, even an illegal one" -- and that therefore Navarro's murderers "had a right to use deadly force ... if he threatened them."

A common scene in an occupied land: Just your friendly neighborhood JBT, chillin' outside a really tricked-out armored vehicle.

Holmes is a prosecutor, so it's not surprising that he lied about the right to resist an illegal arrest. But his assumption that police have the "right" to kill anyone who resists is almost universally shared within both law enforcement and the "Justice" system.


Apparently, Deputy Sinclair and his gang didn't realize the extent of their official impunity: Had they known that they had the "right" to kill anyone who resisted their illegal invasion, it's likely that someone would have died at the Locklear home.


Like many corrupt police in such circumstances, however, the raiders left a relatively light footprint, most likely out of concern that leaving a corpse or two behind would lead to compromising questions. If their paperwork had been in order, they wouldn't have had to display such restraint.


The attack on Alex Locklear's home was just one of scores or hundreds of violent crimes committed by police in Robeson County, North Carolina committed over nearly a decade beginning in 1995. A federal investigation calling itself "Operation Tarnished Badge" eventually produced the conviction of some 22 police officers and Sheriff's Department personnel, including former Sheriff Glenn Maynor.


Deputies assigned to narcotics duty committed a string of crimes, some of them acts of state-sponsored terrorism -- such as fire-bombing homes of suspected drug dealers, or hiring arsonists to burn down the homes of personal enemies. On one occasion, a deputy doused a recalcitrant suspect with lighter fluid and set him on fire. Drug dealers who cooperated were protected from prosecution; one was even given a gun and a police uniform and permitted to take part in a raid.


Hundreds of thousands of dollars were stolen from people under the pretext of drug asset "forfeiture," with much of it skimmed away for personal use without being reported. District Attorney Johnson Britt noticed a bloc of deputies who were living beyond what he assumed to be their means: They bought boats or other expensive recreational vehicles, took cruise ship vacations together, even went in as a group for Lasik eye surgery.


What really rankled Britt, however, was having hundreds of drug cases dismissed because of the incompetence and corruption of drug enforcement officers in Robeson County. After all, how could a prosecutor make a name for himself if his drug cases -- the bread-and-butter of his profession -- kept being dismissed?


Britt contacted the Feds, and soon enough the Feds discovered that the Robeson drug cops were skimming from the profits of the local forfeiture racket. Presumably, if the cops had been faithfully reporting their haul and content with the kickback the Feds provided, or even if their corruption had been contained and relatively modest, the Feds wouldn't have intervened. As it happens, however, dozens of Robeson cops and deputies were put on trial for stealing "federal funds" -- meaning the cash that was seized at gunpoint from people suspected, but not convicted, of drug-related offenses.


What happened in Robeson County in the years between 1995 and 2002 (when "Operation Tarnished Badge" began) was hardly exceptional. There are many other jurisdictions in which, thanks to the federal "War on Drugs," local Police and Sheriff's Departments have mutated into robber gangs.


For several years, Brian Gilbert, Sheriff of Iowa's Dallas County, ran a very lucrative theft ring. Dallas County sits astride a very well-traveled stretch of I-80, the country's major east-west interstate. Gilbert and his deputies preyed heavily on people driving late-model SUVs with out-of-state license plates -- particularly drivers who appeared to be of Latino extraction.


Stopped for alleged traffic infractions, the drivers would be threatened with prosecution for drug-related offenses -- such as "money laundering" -- if they were found to be in possession of significant amounts of cash. That trouble could be avoided if the drivers simply surrendered their vehicles and money to the county.


This little scam netted millions of dollars, and might still be in operation today had Gilbert not gotten a bit too greedy: He was caught taking home several paper sacks filled with money that had been stolen during a traffic stop. For this act of felonious grand larceny, Gilbert lost his job and was given a suspended ten-year prison sentence, along with five years' probation.


Police in Kingsville, Texas have been more disciplined than Gilbert and his gang in Iowa. Because that tiny town is located along Highway 77, a route often used by suspected drug couriers, police have been able to confiscate millions in putative drug proceeds, with eighty percent of what they steal going directly into the city budget. This is why the exceptionally well-paid police in that town of 25,000 have tricked-out high-performance cop cars and all the latest digital toys.


It's important to italicize the fact that the people from whom this money is stolen have not been convicted of crimes -- or even, in most cases, formally accused of crimes. All that is required is the presence of a large amount of cash coupled with an assertion by self-interested law enforcement officers that there is a suspected "nexus" to drug activity of some kind.


A recent federal court decision (entitled -- I'm not kidding -- United States of America v. $124,700, in U.S. Currency) held, in effect, that traveling with a large amount of currency offers sufficient probable cause to justify a narcotics-related forfeiture. Once the proper incantations are uttered and the requisite paperwork is filled out in the typical tax-feeder's sub-literate scrawl, the money itself is found "guilty" and taken into government custody.



Police and prosecutors in Tenaha, Texas -- a town in Shelby County bordering Louisiana -- have added some innovative wrinkles to the familiar forfeiture racket. A current federal lawsuit describes how Tenaha police have refined to a science the practice of targeting motorists -- generally "racial and ethnic minorities, and those in their company" -- for unjustified traffic stops, during which they are questioned as to "whether they have money or valuables" and then subjected to illegal searches.


Should money or items of value be found, the motorist and passengers are then placed under arrest for "money laundering" or drug-related charges, and then given an ultimatum: Sign away their property or face prosecution. This form of extortion-robbery is particularly effective when the victim is carrying an abnormal but relatively small amount of cash -- say, less than $5,000 -- that wouldn't be enough to compensate for the hassle and expense of mounting a legal defense.


In one of the cases described in the lawsuit, an individual named Danny Green who works as an investigator for the Shelby County Prosecutor's Office threatened to kidnap a couple's children if they didn't sign a document surrendering about $6,000 in cash.

Den of thieves:

The Tenaha, Texas City Hall.

George Bowers, the superannuated mayor of Tenaha, insists that the seizures are justified not because of a compelling law enforcement need, but because his municipal government needs the money.


Oh. Well, then -- why not?


Why bother trying to cultivate a local economy when there are innocent motorists to shake down?


To understand the depth of cynical corruption that exists in Shelby County, consider the reaction of District Attorney Lynda Russell to the lawsuit: She sought official permission to use forfeited funds to defend herself from charges that she had illegally confiscated those same funds.



Nope, that isn't David Allen Coe: This vision of feminine refinement is Shelby County District Attorney Lynda Russell (a Republican, natch), a Queenpin (as it were) of the county's forfeiture mob.

If this kind of thing were taking place only in isolated, one-stoplight, speed-trap towns like Tenaha -- places where the local government is the malodorous residue at the bottom of a very shallow gene pool -- it would be disgusting, but avoidable.


But this kind of outright larceny under color of "law" is underway wherever the Feds have fomented an official crime spree in the name of the "war on drugs."


We really shouldn't perceive the "war on drugs" in metaphorical terms. This is an actual war, albeit one that targets individual liberties, rather than illicit commerce.


Thanks to this war, innocent people are frequently terrorized by military assaults on their homes, and injured or even killed without legal consequence. It's because of this war that travelers have a fully justified fear of being illegally detained and robbed at gunpoint by people in government-issued costumes.


That homefront war inspired "exceptions" to the posse comitatus law to permit the hands-on involvement of the military in domestic law enforcement. Even more alarming is the fact that it led directly to the federalization and militarization of law enforcement -- which means that the police themselves are, in effect, an army of occupation right now.



This state of affairs suggests a vitally important mission for the movement called "Oath Keepers" -- an association of retired and active-duty law enforcement and military personnel who define their allegiance in terms of fidelity to the Constitution, rather than loyalty or obedience to political officials.


As men committed to the Constitution, Oath Keepers have made it clear that there are at least ten specific kinds of orders they will not obey -- orders to disarm American civilians, conduct warrantless searches, blockade or interdict American cities, invade and subjugate states that assert their reserved powers and constitutional sovereignty, subject citizens to military tribunals, enforce martial law decrees, or otherwise undermine or infringe upon the constitutionally guaranteed individual rights of Americans.


Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes explains that Oath Keepers will stand down rather than carry out such illegal orders, and be prepared to defend law-abiding citizens against the aggression of a lawless government. Predictably, Oath Keepers has been identified as a domestic enemy by Morris Dees' for-profit Stasi, the so-called Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

SPLC Commissar Mark Potok (whose name, appropriately, is very similar to a Klingon epithet describing a sleazy, cowardly wretch).

According to the SPLC and its allies in the government-aligned media, the principled refusal of Oath Keepers to carry out criminal violence against innocent citizens is a variety of terrorism, or at least something akin to terrorism.


During a recent installment of Chris Matthews' cable television program, Matthews and SPLC apparatchik Mark Potok did their level best to contort comments made by Oath Keepers founder Rhodes into an endorsement of insurrectionary violence.


Matthews, who appears to be bucking for a Daytime Emmy, theatrically feigned incredulity that any responsible person could believe it possible that concentration camps could be erected on American soil -- ignoring such trivial matters as the WWII-era detention of Japanese-Americans and the hideous treatment of American Indians during the 19th Century. For his part, Potok insisted that Oath Keepers were cultivating terrorism by spreading alarmist rhetoric about the possibility of martial law.


Bear in mind that the SPLC's core fund-raising activity consists of hitting up elderly donors with appeal letters that traffic in alarmist rhetoric that treats the tiny, inconsequential white supremacist movement as nothing less than the Fourth Reich on the March.


To judge from the SPLC's standard spiel, the most significant threat to individual rights comes from toothless cretins in Klan regalia and socially inept Nazi wanna-bes with man-boobs. Meanwhile, black Americans, Latinos, and other people for whom the SPLC displays such supposed solicitude are being terrorized by armed government officials who are carrying out a very literal war within our borders.


This presents Oath Keepers with a splendid PR opportunity that should become one of its most important ongoing campaigns: Why doesn't that organization reach out to another estimable group, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, in demanding an end to the "war on drugs"?


Most of the unconscionable acts and policies the Oath Keepers oppose -- wholesale violation of individual rights, detentions, confiscations, civilian disarmament, militarization of domestic law enforcement -- are not a vague future possibility, but rather a tangible reality right now because of the "war on drugs."


Most, but by no means all, of the victims of that war are non-white Americans. It would be entertaining to watching the SPLC try to explain how Oath Keepers could qualify as a "hate group" even as they took up the cause of black and Hispanic Americans suffering official abuse by way of the "war on drugs."


Valuable as it is for Oath Keepers to inoculate police and military personnel against the prospect of wholesale martial law, the group should be urging such personnel to stand down right now when it comes to carrying out manifestly unconstitutional and anti-American drug war policies.


The Oath Keepers should urge police and Sheriff's Departments to reject counter-narcotics grants and federal subsidies of any kind, including equipment transfers and other material support from the Pentagon. They should find the honest and principled law enforcement personnel who are mortified by the transformation of so many police and Sheriff's departments into criminal syndicates through the practice of "asset forfeiture." And they should take the point in reining in the ever-expanding use of SWAT teams (as a prelude to abolishing them outright, of course).


We're constantly reminded that "most" law enforcement officers are decent, public-spirited men who are disgusted and alarmed by corruption and the abuse of power. By urging that law enforcement stand down from the "war on drugs," Oath Keepers could help us learn whether this is actually the case.

(My thanks to several contributors in the comments thread who corrected an error in an earlier version of this essay: I had mistakenly referred to I-85, rather than I-80, as a major east-west interstate highway.)

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