Who Gave You Permission to Notice?

Bizarre totem: Jared Loughner's notorious skull altar.

 Among the "warning signs" of  Jared Loughner's derangement, Time magazine instructs us, was his criticism of Federal Reserve Notes as "worthless." According to the custodians of acceptable opinion, this isn't a rational assessment of the intrinsic value of the Regime's ever-depreciating fiat scrip; it's a symptom of "paranoia," just like Loughner's reported preoccupation with government mind control.


Only those who are clinically deranged could harbor such anti-social views about the government ruling us --an institution representing the refined essence of benevolence, administered by beings of infinite competence whose digestive by-products emit the pleasant odor of freshly cut daisies. This is why the State's media auxiliaries (including the right-collectivists over at National Review) are largely ignoring Loughner's sociopathic indifference to the rights of other individuals while focusing tirelessly on his alienation from the government. 


Perhaps Judy Clarke, Loughner's federally appointed defense counsel, can help cure him of his paranoid political delusions. Clarke is the go-to public defender for people accused of politically sensitive high-profile crimes.
 

A Time magazine profile of Clarke describes her as "particularly skilled at working with unstable clients who, without careful guidance, run a high risk of self-sabotage in what is a life-and-death situation." 

Clarke's clients have included Timothy McVeigh, so-called "20th Hijacker" Zacarias Moussaoui, and Eric Rudolph. Although McVeigh was executed, Moussaoui and Rudolph are serving life sentences at the ADX Florence supermax prison in Colorado. The same facility houses another of Clarke's notable clients:  "Unabomber" Ted Kaczynski, who killed three people and wounded more than a dozen others during a seventeen-year parcel bomb rampage.


Clarke persuaded Kaczynski to accept a plea bargain based on "mental defect." Although Kaczynski is said to suffer from paranoid schizophrenia, there's compelling evidence that any "mental defect" that afflicts him is the result of his involvement as a test subject in a federally sponsored mind control experiment as a Harvard student in the late 1950s.

Ted Kaczynski as a young professor.

By any measure, Ted Kaczynski -- a math prodigy who skipped two grades -- was a brilliant and promising young man. After enrolling in Harvard as a 16-year-old, Kaczynski was lured into acting as a guinea pig in a series of abusive and damaging psychological tests supervised by behavioral psychologist Dr. Henry Murray. 

During World War II, Murray worked with the OSS (which would later become the CIA), developing psychological tests to evaluate potential spies. He also devised methodologies for interrogating POWs. His experiments at Harvard continued seamlessly from his work with the OSS.

Murray's study, which was funded by the Pentagon, the CIA, and the Rockefeller Foundation, was entitled "Multiform Assessments of Personality Development Among Gifted College Men." According to Ted's brother David, this program was not a sterile academic exercise; he describes it as "a conspiracy of psychological researchers who used deceptive tactics to study the effects of emotional and psychological trauma on unwitting human subjects."

Dr. Murray, who died in 1988, "was known for his brilliance and grandiosity" in his professional life, continues David Kaczynski. "In his personal life, according to his biographer, he displayed sadistic tendencies. His research on college men bears a certain resemblance to his research on prisoners of war." 

Most of the pertinent details of Murray's experiments are inaccessible: Harvard sealed the files in 2000, insisting that this was necessary in order to protect the "integrity" of the project. There is cause for suspicion test subjects may have been given LSD or other mind-altering substances, given that the CIA had conducted experiments of that kind with other Harvard students. Whatever happened to Kaczynski and Murray's other subjects was sufficiently degrading and harmful to wring a guilty expression of regret from one of the doctor's assistants.


At age 17, the future Unabomber was one of 22  students who were required to submit to Dr. Murray a detailed description of their upbringing, their everyday routine -- including intimate details involving sexual fantasies and toilet functions -- and a description of their "philosophy of life." They were informed that another student would be invited to discuss and debate their moral values and opinions with them. 



Each of the subjects was taken individually into a white, over-lit room, placed in a chair in front of a one-way mirror, and tethered to EEG machines and other monitoring devices. The atmosphere, according to one subject, was akin to what one would expect in an execution chamber. Rather than having an amicable debate with a fellow undergraduate student, each of the test subjects -- perhaps "victims" is a more suitable description -- was subjected to lengthy, abusive harangues by a law school student who had been given a detailed psychological battle plan by Murray. The spectacle was captured on camera, and each victim was required to relive his humiliation on film.

This was sadism in the service of ideological ambition. The specific focus of Murray's academic research, points out environmental journalist (and fellow Harvard alum) Alston Chase, was to develop a science of personality "transformation." Murray "advocated implementing the agenda of the World Federalist Association, which called for a single world government," Chase noted in a detailed survey article published ten years ago in The Atlantic. 

In a letter to his friend and counselor Lewis Mumford, Murray wrote: "The kind of behavior that is required by the present threat [of nuclear war] involves transformations of personality such as never occurred quickly in human history." Through the marriage of psychiatry and sociology, Murray hoped to beget a hybrid discipline that would eventually create a New World Man suitable for citizenship in the World State he envisioned.

It is indisputable that Murray's Harvard experiments were a continuation of his work with the OSS.  Substantial evidence suggests that Murray's program was part of the CIA's MK Ultra program, in which test subjects -- often college-age men -- were used in experiments involving "sensory deprivation, sleep learning, subliminal projection, electronic brain stimulation, and hallucinogenic drugs to study various applications for behavior modification," recalls David Kaczynski. "One project was designed to see if subjects could be programmed to kill on demand. Experiments were conducted in penal institutions, mental institutions, and on university campuses." 

A 1967 internal CIA assessment documented that hundreds of professors on more than 100 college campuses were involved in clandestine experiments connected to MK Ultra. 

For drawing a link connecting Ted Kaczynski's crimes with what he suffered under the ministrations of Dr. Murray, David Kaczynski might be accused of engaging in special pleading on behalf of his brother, who admitted to murdering three people. 
The same cannot be said of Sally Johnson, the forensic psychologist hired by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons to evaluate Ted Kaczynski during his 1998 trial. 

While Johnson doesn't directly implicate Murray's experiments, she did conclude that Kaczynski's self-appointed mission as an apostle of "revolutionary violence" was triggered by something he experienced at Harvard. 


A psychological evaluation of Ted Kaczynski conducted prior to his experiences under Dr. Murray found no signs that he suffered from schizophrenia. It's reasonable to surmise that the "mental defect" invoked by his defense counsel was induced, rather than innate. 

Furthermore, there was nothing defective in Kaczynski's perception of the malign nature of the system as he had experienced it. His frequently expressed concerns "about the possibility of mind control," as Chase points out, were not "paranoid delusions. In view of Murray's experiment, he was not only rational but right. The university and the psychiatric establishment had been willing accomplices in an experiment that had treated human beings as unwitting guinea pigs, and had treated them brutally."


Murray's program was discontinued in 1962, the same year that Kaczynski graduated from Harvard. That year was a busy one for those employed by the academic wing of the Military-Industrial Complex, as they continued to toil away at various esoteric projects exploring the use of applied psychology to build the Total State.

At Yale,  Stanley Milgram was conducting his notorious  pseudo-electroshock experiments on obedience to authority.* At MIT, Lincoln P. Bloomfield finished a report -- funded by the US State Department on behalf of the Institute for Defense Analyses -- entitled A World Effectively Controlled by the United Nations: A Preliminary Study of One Form of a Stable Military Environment. (Bloomfield's report didn't envision a foreign takeover of the United States through the UN, but rather the creation of "supra-national institutions, characterized by mandatory universal membership and some ability to employ physical force" -- something akin to the vaguely UN-centered "coalition of the willing" approach used by Washington it is war against Serbia in 1999 and in its continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.) 

Bloomfield's report contained the provocative and telling observation that building the world order he described would require "a grave crisis or war to bring about a sudden transformation in national attitudes sufficient for the purpose.... [T]he order we examine may be brought into existence as a result of a series of sudden, nasty, and traumatic shocks." This would have meant subjecting the population at large to the same  kind of "transformative" psychological trauma that Dr. Murray had prescribed to create the New World Man on an individual basis. 

Three days after Bloomfield submitted his report, General Lyman Louis Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, filed a memorandum for Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara outlining "Operation Northwoods." That document outlined the use of various potential false-flag terrorist incidents that could be used to provide a pretext for war with Cuba. In his book Body of Secrets, intelligence analyst James Bamford observes that the bogus Gulf of Tonkin incident used to justify the Vietnam War was a variation on the Northwoods strategy.

The Northwoods memo offers a variety of potential provocations involving staged terrorist attacks.

"We could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated)," wrote Lemnitzer, casually spit-balling proposals that would result in the death of  innocent people. "We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized. Exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots ... would be helpful." Lemnitzer's most audacious proposal -- which is especially noteworthy in the post-9/11 era -- involved the staged shoot-down of a civilian jetliner.

 The Northwoods memo was a battle plan for psychological warfare against the American population -- a menu of options for inducing the "sudden, nasty and traumatic shocks" necessary to bring about a desired political transformation. This was just one of several projects of its kind underway at the time. And Ted Kaczynski was just one of hundreds -- perhaps thousands -- of people whose minds were being weaponized by the CIA's academic assets.


"The CIA's mind experiment program was vast," notes investigative reporter Alexander Cockburn. "How many other human time bombs were thus primed? How many of them have exploded, with the precipating agent never identified?"

Interestingly, Gen. Lemnitzer helped ensure that those questions wouldn't be answered. In 1975, six years after he retired from the military, Lemnitzer was appointed by Gerald Ford to participate in the President's Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States, commonly known as the Rockefeller Commission. That body -- like its ancestor, the Warren Commission, and its descendant, the 9/11 Commission -- was intended to filter out any consideration of the most important questions, thereby banishing them from polite conversation. 


Whatever its clinical definition might be, the term "paranoid" as employed by the custodians of polite opinion refers to someone who notices things without official permission. People meeting that description might take impermissible notice of the curious fact that the same defense attorney who quietly ushered Ted Kaczynski off the stage is now being called on to perform the same service with respect to Jared Loughner -- and be prompted by that fact to ask some similarly unacceptable questions.

___
*Dr. Sharon Presley, an authority on the Milgram experiment, states emphatically -- and, as far as I can tell, definitively -- that "Milgram had nothing to do with any MIC [Military-Industrial-Complex] project." She also points out, correctly, that Milgram's experiments did not involve the kinds of abuse that Murray's project entailed. I regret my inaccurate description of Milgram's study as a project of the MIC's academic auxiliary, and the implication that his methods were comparable to the unconscionable abuses committed by Murray.

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The Cult of Sanctified Violence

A Mundane kneels  before a royal carriage bearing the Sanctified Personage of the Killer-in-Chief.

Force -- Force to the utmost; Force without stint or limit, the righteous and triumphant Force which shall make Right the law of the world and cast every selfish dominion down in the dust. --

Deranged mass murderer Woodrow Wilson explains his philosophy of government, April 6, 1917.  

The scientific concept of dictatorship means nothing else but this: Power without limit, resting directly on force, restrained by no laws, absolutely unrestricted by rules. --

Deranged mass murderer Vladimir Lenin, agreeing in principle with Wilson. 

"What is government if words have no meaning?"

Jared Loughner reportedly posed that question to Rep. Gabrielle Giffords at a forum two years ago. Perhaps unwittingly, Loughner answered that question himself by murdering six people and attempting to murder fourteen others, including Giffords. In doing so, the young nihilist effectively privatized government's central function.

Shorn of the sophistries that provide it with a moral disguise, pared down to its essentials, political government is the systematic use of exactly the same kind of criminal violence employed by Loughner, only on a much grander scale. This was illustrated the day before  Loughner's murderous rampage, when agents of the government ruling us used a remote-controlled drone operated from the safety of an office building in Nevada to murder six people in Pakistan's North Waziristan region.

Americans were not admonished to observe a moment of chastened silence in memory of the victims of that exercise in criminal violence. This is, in part, because observances of that kind would quickly become tedious: Since 2008, Pakistan -- a country with which the government ruling us is not formally at war -- has endured at least 250 drone attacks, in which roughly 1,400 people have been killed.

According to the most conservative estimate of "collateral damage," only a tithe of those slaughtered through drone strikes are "militants."

Hundreds of civilians have likewise been massacred in the ongoing "surge" in Afghanistan, many of them in nighttime raids by "Special Operations Forces" -- that is, death squads -- whose behavior is not easily distinguishable from that of Jared Loughner. At least a hundred thousand civilians have been annihilated in the continuing war in Iraq, which was inaugurated for reasons just as delusional as anything that percolated in Loughner's distressed mind.

For those who worship at the altar of the omnipotent State, mass murder of this kind is an exercise in sanctified violence. In a 2009 interview with Foreign Policy magazine, Bill Clinton -- who has repeatedly denounced  "anti-government" speech as a form of criminal sedition -- defined terrorism as “killing and robbery and coercion by people who do not have state authority." (Emphasis added.) What this means, of course, is that "killing and robbery and coercion" by duly authorized agents of the State isn't terrorism, it's policy. 

You see, bombs and drones may demolish homes, but only "anti-government" words can harm us. This is why one of the political elite's most urgent priorities is the control and criminalization of anti-government speech.

Thus Rep. Robert Brady, a Pennsylvania Democrat, announced that he would propose legislation criminalizing verbal or symbolic expression that could be perceived as conveying a threat against a federal official, or an incitement to violence against such exalted personages.

"The president is a federal official," observed Brady. "You can't do it to him; you should not be able to do it to a congressman, senator, or federal judge.... The rhetoric is just ramped up so negatively, so high, that we have got to shut this down."

That last statement, of course, is an oblique but unmistakable threat: How else would federal officials "shut this down" without the involvement of armed functionaries authorized to kill those who would resist? 

"All we're doing is trying to protect ourselves," simpered Brady, announcing that this new assault on what remains of the First Amendment would begin as soon as Congress re-convenes. He also reported that his proposal found support on both sides of the aisle. This isn't surprising. For House Speaker John Boehner, the most important thing in the aftermath of the Safeway Massacre was to assert the primacy of the coercive class: "An attack on one who serves is an attack on all who serve. Such acts of violence have no place in our society."

If Boehner's intent was to denounce criminal violence against the innocent, why did Boehner italicize the sanctified status of Judge Roll and Congresswoman Giffords?

The same priorities were on display in the charges filed against Loughner in his arraignment: One count of attempting to assassinate a member of Congress, two counts of unlawfully killing a federal employee, and two counts of attempting to kill a federal employee. The crime committed in Tucson is covered by Arizona's state laws, of course, and the victims -- including all four who were murdered, not merely the federal judge and congressional aide -- were all residents of the state.

But in death, as in life, those on the federal payroll are to be regarded as consecrated beings. This is why an attack them is not merely a crime of violence, but -- in the words of FBI Director Robert Mueller -- an "attack on our institutions and our way of life," or, as totalitarian theologian Jim Wallis put it, an attack on the "soul of the nation."

Wallis could be considered the Obama administration's court prophet. Economist and investigative journalist Bill Anderson points out that neither Wallis nor his publication, Sojourners ever so much as mentioned -- let alone condemned -- the 1993 federal massacre at Mt. Carmel, in which scores of innocent people (including seventeen young children) were either immolated or slaughtered by automatic gunfire when they tried to escape their burning sanctuary.

"The people who were shot and immolated at the Branch Davidian location were not real people to Wallis, who sees literally everything in political symbolism," observes Anderson. "So, the rule of thumb is that if he cannot find a way to put an incident into his worship of the State, it simply doesn’t happen."

Idolater: Rev. Bellows.

Wallis has anointed himself an apostle of what he calls "God's politics," a perspective in which Mao's totalitarian regime is considered the ideal "Christian state." He is hardly a modern aberration; the concept of the state as "God walking on the earth" has been around since Hegel. Its first significant American expression may have come in the form of a February 1, 1863 sermon entitled "Unconditional Loyalty," which was preached -- and later published as a pamphlet -- by Rev. Henry W. Bellows, the immensely influential Unitarian minister of New York City's All Souls Church.

Bellows insisted that Abraham the Destroyer, as "head of the nation," was literally "a sacred person.... You cannot rudely assail the personal character or judgment of a Chief Magistrate, without weakening public respect for the office he holds.... To rally round the President -- without question or dispute -- is the first and most sacred duty of loyal citizens...."

Rev. Bellows extolled the U.S. President as a literally messianic figure; his text was the messianic prophecy of Isaiah 9:6, which contains the phrase "and the government shall be upon his shoulder." Those who condemned Lincoln's crimes against the Constitution, he insisted, were made of the same wretched stuff from which were formed "the enemies of our Saviour, who were always flinging in his blessed face the authority of the Mosaic law."

Bellows granted that Lincoln violated the Constitution in countless ways, but maintained that just as Jesus was the incarnate Lawgiver, Lincoln should be regarded as the living Constitution. Were the actual written document to prove an insuperable impediment to Lincoln's divine mission, "the sooner it were abandoned, the better."

But Rev. Bellows wasn't content to hymn the praises of the Divine Lincoln and heap anathemas on the heads of those who failed to recognize his transcendent magnificence. Indeed, his purpose was to plead "the sacred cause of Government itself." He shuddered with pious disapproval at the spectacle of "Government despised, sneered at and distrusted by its own children."

Those in the employ of the Federal Government, Bellows insisted, are men "whose characters and reputation ought at this time to be under the shield of every patriotic citizen's allegiance and gratitude." Yes, at one point they were mere Mundanes, commonplace human beings burdened with the same weaknesses that afflict all of us. Now, however, "the lightning of God has touched them, and rendered them sacred," Bellows pontificated. They are entitled not only to dispose of the lives and property of the lesser beings they rule, but to their praise and worship as well.

"Thus, brethren, do I commend to you the cause of unconditional loyalty," Bellows summarized, issuing an idolatrous grand commission to his congregation to become "missionaries" of the divine State "wherever you go, and with whomsoever you are conversant. Let our women and children become the propagandists of unconditional loyalty. The country needs not only the fealty of her sons, but of her daughters who sing the songs of patriotic devotion at your hearth-stones.... Frown on every syllable of distrust, of wavering, of disrespect, that pollutes the air you breathe. Require of all your friends to be first the friends of the nation! Have nobody's love that does not love the country more! Make a religion of patriotism."


Bellows' oration was one of many he made in the service of what he called the "holy war" to vindicate the power of the central government over those who had withdrawn their consent to be ruled by it. In coming decades, the themes and tropes he expressed would be embroidered and delivered by other acolytes of the Total State -- in Russian, German, Italian, Korean, and other languages. And the Bellows Estate should collect a royalty payment every time critics of government are accused of fomenting "violence" by speaking irreverently of the Holy State.

Occasions like the Safeway Massacre should prompt condemnation of all criminal violence against the innocent. Instead, they prompt public liturgies that celebrate the Divine State and its monopoly on the "legitimate" use of lethal violence -- and offer the President an opportunity to carry out his ceremonial function as Pontifex Maximus of the civil religion. Some people describe this kind of thing as an "Oklahoma City moment," in which an episode of mass bloodshed inspires an altar call for Americans who have lost their faith in the divine State: The prodigals are given an opportunity to "Come to Molech," as it were.

Shortly after winning re-election in November 1996, Bill Clinton confided to reporters on Air Force One that his political recovery began with the Oklahoma City bombing: “It broke a spell in the country as people began searching for our common ground again.” That "common ground," as Rev. Bellows put it, is found in unqualified submission to the central government. 

Just weeks ago, interestingly enough, former Hillary Clinton campaign strategist Mark Penn described Clinton's "OKC moment" during a panel discussion on MSNBC’s Hardball program. Barack Obama "right now seems removed" from the public, Penn pointed out. "It wasn’t until that speech [after the bombing] that [Clinton] really clicked with the American public.” According to Penn,  Obama needed “a similar kind” of opportunity for greatness.

Obama now has that opportunity.

By way of a postscript....

Rep. Peter King, Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee and former bagman for the IRA, plans to introduce legislation that would make it a federal crime for Mundanes to carry firearms within 1000 feet of a federal official. This proscription wouldn't apply to those employed to protect those sanctified personages, of course.


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From Terrorist Bagman to Homeland Security Overlord: The Curious Career of Peter King

There's only two things wrong with him -- his face: Congressman Peter "Janus" King

In the person of Congressman Peter King (R-New York), the incoming chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, the abstraction called "hypocrisy" has acquired tangible human form. After spending decades canvassing his fellow Irish-American Catholics to raise money for terrorists in Northern Ireland, King has promised to conduct a wide-ranging investigation of American Muslim congregations and cultural organizations in search of people providing "material support" for Islamic terrorism.

"We have to break through this politically correct nonsense which keeps us from debating and discussing what I think is one of the most vitally important issues in this country," King insists. "We are under siege by Muslim terrorists and yet there are Muslim leaders in this country who do not cooperate with law enforcement."

King has also demanded that the WikiLeaks whistleblower organization be designated a terrorist organization. He insists that the group provided "material support" to terrorism by publishing hundreds of thousands of pages' worth of previously classified documents, many of them describing criminal acts and institutionalized corruption on the part of policy-makers in the U.S. government.  It's reasonable to suspect that King's antipathy toward WikiLeaks is inspired, at least in part, by personal concerns. 

Among the documents made public by WikiLeaks is one that could be of particular interest to King -- a February 2010 CIA "Red Cell Special Memorandum" -- an "out-of-the-box" analysis examining "what it would mean for the US to be seen ... as an incubator and `exporter of terrorism.'" For example: "Some Irish-Americans have long provided financial aid and material support for violent efforts to compel the United Kingdom to relinquish control of Northern Ireland.... The US-based Irish Northern Aid Committee (NORAID), founded in the late 1960s, provided the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) with money that was frequently used for arms purchases."

NORAID was designated by the Justice Department as an arm of the IRA more than thirty years ago. King, whose Long Island district has a large and well-organized Irish-American constituency, was one of the group's most effective fundraisers and one of the IRA's staunchest supporters.

"We must pledge ourselves to support those brave men and women who this very moment are carrying forth the struggle against British imperialism in the streets of Belfast and Derry," King declared during a 1982 rally on behalf of the IRA in Nassau County. The "Provos" heartily reciprocated King's affection.

"During his visits to Ireland, Mr. King would often stay with well-known leaders of the IRA, and he socialized in IRA drinking haunts," recalled Irish journalist Ed Moloney, author of the definitive work A Secret History of the IRA, in a 2005 New York Sun profile written after King's tardy and reluctant break with the group. "At one of such clubs, the Felons, membership was limited to IRA veterans who had served time in jail."

Granted, many honorable and decent men -- both from Northern Ireland and elsewhere -- have become familiar with the inside of a prison cell. But the ex-convicts with whom King socialized during his visits to Ireland generally weren't innocent political prisoners.

King (center) meets with supporters of a  Malachy McAllister, a convicted Irish terrorist.

 King served as chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee from 2005 until the Republicans lost their majority in the 2006 mid-term election. During his last stint in that post, King used his influence to intervene on behalf of Malachy McAllister.

In 1981, McAllister served as an armed lookout during an ambush of a policeman outside a pub in Northern Ireland. The victim, it must be said, was a member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, a paramilitary force that became notorious for beating and otherwise mistreating innocent people. McAllister served three years in a British prison for his role in the ambush.

In 1988, after McAllister was released from prison, he narrowly escaped being killed by a Loyalist paramilitary gang that opened fire on his family's home in Belfast. The McAllisters fled to Canada, and in 1996 and settled in Wallington, New York. Seven years later the McAllisters' home came under armed siege once again -- this time by agents of the Department of Homeland Security, who carried out a 5 a.m. raid to enforce a deportation order. The family was to be expelled on account of what the agency called McAllister's "terrorist activities" a quarter-century ago.

A stay was issued while the deportation order was examined in the courts. King used the interval to lobby Homeland Security Commissar Michael Chertoff. In a letter to Chertoff, King insisted that McAllister's  family would likely be murdered if they were sent back to Northern Ireland.

McAllister, like many Catholics in Ulster, endured inexcusable treatment at the hands of  British occupation forces and Loyalist thugs. He admits to committing the acts for which he was incarcerated, but describes himself as a combatant in a civil war, rather than a terrorist. That distinction is difficult to defend in light of the fact that McAllister was a member of the Irish National Republican Army (INLA) -- the military wing of the Irish Republican Socialist Party (IRSP).

Whatever the merits of the Irish Republican cause, the INLA was not created merely to obtain independence for Northern Ireland, or to defend the rights of an abused minority. The group, which budded off from the "official" IRA in 1974, was a tiny, ultra-violent Leninist cell within the IRSP. While the Party specialized in political agitation, the INLA carried out bombings, assassinations, kidnappings, extortion, and other forms of "direct action" that frequently targeted helpless civilians.

It's quite likely that some of the money raised by Peter King on behalf of NORAID wound up funding the INLA's rampage. The group also received financial aid and training from Libya and the PLO.

The group's objective has never been merely to reclaim Ulster from the UK: It is committed to the unification of all 32 counties of Ireland in a socialist "worker's republic" of the kind that has been such an unqualified blessing in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Like other "liberation" movements of a similar vintage, the INLA cynically invested its Leninist political agenda with religious language and symbolism.

The INLA's cadres and supporters saw the group's terrorist campaign as, literally, a holy war.  And Peter King, the once and future chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, gave eager and unapologetic material support to that terrorist jihad.

Despite King's backstory, his unqualified support for open-ended war abroad and authoritarian measures at home has made him a favorite of Fox News and other elements of the War Party's media apparatus. Commentator Jim Kouri, a vice president of the National Association of Chiefs of Police, commends King for his support for "those on the frontline of the war on terrorism," which supposedly offers a favorable contrast to the record of "`useful idiots' ...  such as Rep. John Conyers, who actually supports Fifth-Column Islamic groups against his own nation." 

After all, didn't Conyers spend decades raising money for terrorists allied with Libya and the PLO, and then use his political clout on behalf of a would-be cop-killer who belonged to a Leninist criminal gang? No, wait a second: That was King, not Conyers.

"Liberators"? IRA rep Gerry Adams and Fidel Castro.

King's opponent in the recent mid-term congressional election tried, without success, to make an issue of the incumbent's support for Irish terrorism. Some of King's supporters attempted to dismiss the matter by pointing out that the IRA and its offshoots have never been a threat to the United States. Of course, the same is true of Hamas, Hezbollah, and other Islamic terrorist groups  that have long considered themselves to be comrades with the IRA in the struggle for global "liberation." 

As Chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, King will be the tribune of a large and growing "anti-Sharia" constituency, which is composed of people who insist that every mosque should be treated as a jihadist recruitment center and weapons depot. From that perspective -- as articulated by Frank Gaffney, its most forceful exponent -- anybody who believes in and practices the religion of Islam should be presumptively regarded as guilty of sedition.

With Sinn Fein official Martin McGuiness, 2000.

Historian Sharon Davies points out that the unfolding "anti-Sharia" campaign updates and transposes a very similar crusade from a century ago:

"In the early 1900s, many Americans were genuinely frightened by the perceived religious threat of the Roman Catholic Church and the suspected imperialistic intentions of its leader, the Pope. He was plotting the overthrow of the United States, warned the feature, to `make America Catholic.' His foot soldiers, tens of thousands of Catholic men who called themselves the Knights of Columbus, were busily stockpiling arms and ammunition in the basements of their churches, all in preparation for the day when their papist leader would give the signal for the violent insurrection to begin."

Fear of a Papist Holy War was propagated by widely read and hugely influential anti-Catholic publications,  promoted by a revived Ku Klux Klan, and coalesced into state "convent inspection laws" permitting warrantless searches of monasteries, chapels, and rectories. Peter King's career almost seems like a perverse attempt to validate the work of those early 20th Century anti-Catholic bigots.

Between 1971 and 2005, about 1,800 people in Ireland were killed by IRA bombers and gunmen; the equivalent death toll in the United States would be  360,000 people. During that generation-long onslaught, the IRA "made the car-bomb the modern terrorist weapon du jour and perfected the manufacture of fertilizer-based home-made explosives of the sort now routinely used by jihadists," observes historian Moloney.

Peter King "owes his political career almost entirely to the ties he forged" with the people who carried out that bloody campaign, Moloney concludes. King's very first act after being elected to his congressional seat "was to jump on a plane to Belfast for a rousing celebration in the Felon's Club."

"Behind every great fortune, there's a crime," wrote Balzac. It's tempting to say the same of political careers, but this isn't strictly true: Crime is integral to politics. After all, politics is the business of managing the State, which as Murray Rothbard pointed out is nothing but organized banditry.

Peter King apparently isn't equipped with either a conscience or a sense of irony, so he isn't likely to appreciate the fact that his political career perfectly encapsulates the process through which petty thugs are transmuted into "statesmen."

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