"You Can No Longer Think of Yourselves as Peace Officers": Militarizing "Lockdown High"

 It was Friday the 13th, and Skylar Walters thought he was going to die. 

The 16-year-old inmate of Orangeville Jr.-Sr. High in Illinois was in gym class when a deranged-looking man barged into the school and began firing what appeared to be a handgun at several of the other students.

"I started praying to God and saying my last words," Skylar later recalled. "I was scared. I didn't know what to do."

As the intruder fired his gun, he called out the name of a particular student; the youngster quite sensibly fled the building. Other kids "were just running everywhere and crying and hiding," Skylar recounted. Some of the panicking schoolkids probably attempted to call or text their parents to describe the horror unfolding in front of them. They didn't know that each of the parents had been instructed not to answer if his child issued a desperate plea for help. 

That last sadistic touch is what distinguished the May 13 "active shooter drill" in Orangeville from countless other performances of its kind staged in schools across the Soyuz by the Police State Play Actors' Guild. Most of the time, the kids for whose supposed benefit those drills are choreographed -- and the parents responsible for their care, education, and upbringing -- are let in on the joke.

Last October 10, for example, a mob of "between 80 and 100 officials" from law enforcement agencies staged a little Garrison State melodrama in New York's William H. Barton Intermediate School. As described in the Glens Falls Post-Star: 

"Fire alarms sounded at 9:31 a.m., drawing closed doors. Three Warren County sheriff's officers and two state troopers conducted the first search, where they encountered students in a hallway and instructed them to sit down. They reached a second floor on a north wing of the school and found several bodies laying across the hallway. Police searched the classrooms, bathrooms and even an elevator, pressing their backs against walls before entering rooms and calling out `clear.' A cafeteria was secured as a transfer point for victims with casualties, and a triage site for patient evaluation was at a nearby school."

In that exercise, students -- some of them in grade school -- were recruited to play "victims." One of them was the third-grade daughter of Heather Holl, who was herself cast as a "victim" in the third trimester of pregnancy. Another bit player, Heather's son Alexander, "played the role of a gunshot victim" with an entry wound in his chest and a large exit wound in the back. 

It should be pointed out that the tactics employed in the "active shooter" scenario at the William H. Barton School focused on officer safety, rather than active intervention on behalf of the victims. In real life, Alexander Holl would have been one of several unarmed, helpless schoolchildren killed while the SWAT team -- encased in body armor and brandishing high-performance weaponry -- took exquisite care to minimize its exposure to risk.

 "He's excited," Heather commented as her son  was transported away from the scene by medical personnel. "He didn't even sleep last night."

At least he was given a copy of the script before the staged shooting began. The students who were deprived of that indispensable intelligence in Orangeville most likely aren't sleeping well now -- not because they're full of eager anticipation, but rather because they suffer from post-traumatic stress. 

Parents were required to participate passively in the scenario played out in Orangeville: They weren't informed about the event until curtain time, and then ordered to participate in an information embargo targeting their terrified kids. 

What this means, of course, is that although the disguised deputy playing the role of assailant was firing blanks, the schoolkids were, quite literally, being held hostage.

If a bank robber bluffs his way through a heist with a toy gun, he's committed a real crime. The same is true of the people who terrorized the inmates of Orangeville Jr.-Sr. High on May 13. School District Superintendent Randy Otto has submitted his resignation, and some parents have discussed the possibility of a lawsuit -- but the appropriate criminal charges against those responsible aren't forthcoming.

"Our number one goal is to save lives," warbled Leigh Anne Ryals, Emergency Management Director for Baldwin County, Alabama, following a similar school shooter drill in Robertsdale's Central Baldwin Middle School a few years ago. The means such drills employ are incompatible with that goal, since the standard template is based on the "Lockdown" Scenario: The killers conduct the rampage on their own terms, end it at a time of their choosing, and the SWAT team merely cattle-pens the victims. 

WKRG.com News

Like every other "security" measure inflicted on Americans since 9/11, the "lockdown" scenario treats schoolchildren as a tactical impediment -- or perhaps even a threat -- to be dealt with, rather than as innocent people to be protected. That model was actually put in place before 9/11 -- even before Columbine - as part of the federal "Safe Schools" dogma that grew out of the Regime's narcotics price support program (sometimes dishonestly called the "War on Drugs"). 

Today it is typical for police agencies to deploy "Resource Officers" to prowl the halls of schools in search of misbehavior that can be treated as criminal offenses, rather than disciplinary problems. 

 In his keynote address to the 2007 National Association of School Resources Conference, held against the rugged and forbidding backdrop of Orlando's Disney World, self-styled tactical and counter-terrorism John Giduck offered a telling glimpse into the mindset of the armed strangers who haunt local government schools:


"You've got to be a one-man fighting force.... You've got to have enough guns, and ammunition and body armor to stay alive.... You should be walking around in schools every day in complete tactical equipment, with semi-automatic weapons.... You can no longer afford to think of yourselves as peace officers.... You must think of yourself [sic] as soldiers in a war because we're going to ask you to act like soldiers." (Emphasis added.)

In her immensely informative and tirelessly infuriating new book Lockdown High: When The Schoolhouse becomes a Jailhouse, investigative reporter Annette Fuentes  describes Giduck's audience as " a sea of khaki uniforms, some [of whom in the crowd] were waring holstered handguns.... [M]ore than a few had shaved heads and bulging bellies or biceps. Some had both. If drug tests had been required for registration, odds are that a few steroid-positives could have resulted among the more muscular attendees."


Giduck himself has appointed himself an authority on the tactics and training of special forces despite a resume untainted by actual experience in the same. In similar fashion Giduck advertises himself as a world-caliber authority on radical Islam and counter-terrorism: He claims to have been tutored in counter-terrorism by "Putin's boss," the former head of the KGB, and to have trained with Soviet-era special forces, during a visit to Russia in the late Gorbachev era. Assuming that Giduck is telling the truth, that line on his vita should summarily disqualify him from having anything to do with children anywhere.


Whatever proves to be the truth about Giduck's claims, he is a prominent figure among the cohort Fuentes calls the "Profiteers of Lockdown High" -- an interlocking collection of governmental and quasi-private bureaucracies committed to eradicating the few substantive distinctions separating schools from prisons.

"Every day in communities across the United States, children and adolescents spend the majority of their waking hours in schools that increasingly have come to resemble places of detention more than places of learning," observes Fuentes.  Federally subsidized "zero tolerance" policies have created what Fuentes and other critics of the system call the "school-to-prison pipeline": "If yesterday's prank got a slap on the wrist, today those wrists could be slapped with handcuffs."

The danger here is not merely that schools have been largely transformed into short-term prison facilities; it's that the SROs deployed therein take seriously Giduck's catechism about being combat-ready "warriors," rather than peace officers. Their operational credo is not "protect and serve," but rather "control and dominate" -- and, with increasing frequency, "close and kill."

Those options are compellingly displayed in two entirely unnecessary police assaults on young teenagers: The case  of 17-year-old Derby, Kansas resident Jonathan Villareal, who was beaten, tasered, and handcuffed by police "resource officers" who took offense over the way the high school student was wearing his pants; and the murder of 14-year-old San Antonio reform school student Derek Lopez. Significantly, both of those incidents occurred after school hours.

Relieved by the end of his daily sentence in the government mind-laundry, Jonthan passed a brace of officially licensed bullies on the way to the bus. One of them told Jonathan to pull up his pants; the youngster replied -- hopefully with the appropriate measure of controlled contempt -- that school was over and he was thus free to dress any way he chose.

One of the thugs -- his tax-fattened bulk making him much larger than the scrawny adolescent --  threw Jonathan to the ground while bellowing the familiar rapist's refrain: "Stop resisting!" The other thug immediately joined in, both of them striking and kneeing the prone, helpless teenager in the back, legs, and neck. Jonathan also suffered a black eye.

When Jonathan struggled to his feet, he was thrown down forcefully; he felt his arm snap as he hit the ground. He struggled to his feet again, thereby giving one of the costumed enforcers an excuse to report that the victim had assumed an "aggressive stance." This supposedly justified a potentially lethal taser attack.

The Derby High School newspaper, appropriately called the Informer, explained that students can be subjected to "administrative" discipline for wearing their pants "inappropriately." Derby Police Chief Robert Lee described the incident as "a flagrant violation of school policy that could have been handled administratively, if he had not resisted the SRO."

Once again, we see the logic of the rapist at work: If the victim is severely injured or killed for fighting back, it's her own fault; she shouldn't have resisted. This comparison, of course, is unfair: Rapists and other aggressors not swaddled in government-issued costumes aren't generally permitted to file criminal charges against victims who fight back. The Derby Police Department "will take the incident to the district attorney for possible criminal charges against Villareal," observes the Informer. 

Through an interpreter, Villareal's mother said that she "understands if they need to arrest him for being disrespectful," but that she doesn't understand why "they need to beat him up for whatever reason."

The short answer, of course, is this: They do it because they can.

Derby High's dress code is described as part of an effort to beat back the insidious "gang culture" considered to be a besetting scourge of society. Doubtless the school also participates in the Regime's "anti-bullying campaign," in which students are encouraged to rat out each other whenever they hear inappropriate comments, or see what they believe to be inappropriate conduct.

None of this applies to the sanctified bullies in military attire, of course. Since they belong to the State's punitive priesthood, those skeevy armed adults can loiter around schools, leering like Aqualung at underage girls and taunting smaller young males in an attempt to provoke them into doing something to justify a righteous beating -- followed by prosecution for "resisting arrest."

With troubling frequency, this State-authorized bullying involves the use of consistently lethal weapons, such as the ubiquitous portable electro-shock torture device. On occasion, it involves unambiguous criminal homicide. Witness the November 12, 2010 killing of Derek Lopez by Officer Daniel Alvarado of San Antonio's Northside Independent School District Police.

Alvarado was an exceptionally unqualified officer even by the dismal standards that prevail among the ranks of tax-subsidized gun thugs. Between March 2006 and November 2010, Alvarado was suspended four times. Four times he was informed by supervisors that he faced "immediate termination."

For some reason -- most likely one rooted in police union politics -- when it came time to fire Alvarado, his superiors just couldn't bring themselves to pull the trigger. Alvarado displayed no similar scruples on November 12, 2010, when he murdered 14-year-old Derek Lopez, who had just taken part in a brief scuffle with another student.

Owing to his own troubled past, Lopez was a student at the Bexar County Juvenile Justice Academy. At around 4:30 PM on the fatal day, Lopez sucker-punched a 13-year-old classmate at a bus stop.

"He just hit me once," the student later recalled in a sworn deposition. "It wasn't a fight. It was nothing."

Unfortunately, Alvarado happened to be prowling the intersection in his patrol car, and witnessed the trivial dust-up.

"Freeze!" Alvarado shouted at Lopez, who bolted from the scene. Alvarado, in his mid-40s, briefly gave token pursuit before wheezing out the first of several self-serving falsehoods.

"I just had one run from me," gasped the winded tax-feeder. "I saw an assault in progress. He punched the guy several times." (Emphasis added.)

A supervisor instructed Alvarado "not [to] do any big search over there" in pursuit of the assailant. "Let's stay with the victim and see if we can identify [the suspect] that way."

Rather than doing as he was ordered, Alvarado bundled the "victim" -- who was probably more terrified of the armed functionary than of his obnoxious classmate -- into the patrol car and went in pursuit of Lopez.

Lopez vaulted a nearby fence and hid in a backyard shed containing Christmas decorations. The homeowner saw the intrusion, and a neighbor flagged down Alvarado's patrol car. The officer drew his gun "when he came up the driveway," recalled the homeowner.

Within a minute or so, a single gunshot resonated through the neighborhood. When asked by the horrified homeowner what had happened, Alvarado -- who reportedly looked "dazed or distant" -- replied that Lopez "came at me."

"The suspect bull rushed his way out of the shed and lunged right at me," the timorous creature later claimed in an official report. "The suspect was literally inches away from me, and I feared for my own safety."(Emphasis added.)

Alvarado was lying, of course. An autopsy revealed "no evidence of close range firing [on] the wound," and no gunpowder stains were found on the victim's bloody t-shirt.

By this time, the boy who had taken the punch at the bus stop had called his mother via cell phone. She arrived shortly after Alvarado had gunned down Lopez.

"At one point, the mother told a witness, `He shot him? Why did he shoot him? He didn't have to shoot him," reports the San Antonio News-Express.

Alvarado, who four times was on the cusp of being fired for insubordination, disobeyed a direct order on November 12. He falsified key details of the shooting in his official report. A 14-year-old boy was gunned down execution-style for the venial offense of engaging in an adolescent scuffle, and for compelling an overweight middle-aged badge-polisher to run a few hundred yards. According to the San Antonio Police Department, this is all perfectly acceptable: The department ruled that the murder of Derek Lopez was a "justified" shooting.

Although he's been removed from patrol duty, Alvarado remains on the force, albeit in a tax-underwritten sinecure. Although he had repeatedly been threatened with termination for sloppiness or defiance in carrying out administrative duties, Alvarado faces neither criminal prosecution nor professional censure for murdering a 14-year-old boy.

Apparently, insubordination in carrying out office functions is a much graver matter than insubordination that results in the needless death of an adolescent Mundane.

Despite the fact that this incident involved two teenage boys who attended a special school for troubled juveniles, parents should understand that students in practically any government-run "educational" institution can fall prey to sudden -- and potentially lethal -- police violence.

The purpose of "active shooter drills" is not to refine protocols intended to protect inmates of government schools; instead, it is to habituate children to the presence of paramilitary operators in their midst. Parents should ponder that reality as millions of young Americans begin their welcome Summer parole from the government's hybrid school/prison system -- and they should likewise consider the wisdom of making that parole an unconditional pardon. 

Once again, my sincere thanks....

... to everyone who has donated to keep Pro Libertate up and running. The copies of Global Gun Grab should have arrived by now; in the event of an oversight, please contact me (WNGrigg[at]msn[dot]com) and I'll expedite the matter.

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Dum spiro, pugno!

Clarence Dupnik's Death Squad

A home invasion in Tucson, Arizona; below, right, its equivalent in Mosul, Iraq.

 




















Why did they use a SWAT team? 

If  Tucson resident Jose Guerena was plausibly suspected of narcotics trafficking, why wasn't he arrested on his way to or from his job at the nearby Asarco Mission copper mine? What justified a military assault on his home, when investigators knew that they could have executed a conventional search warrant?

 Jose was never charged with a crime. In a previous encounter with police he consented to a search of his vehicle. In an separate traffic stop, Jose was a passenger in a car in which police found a handgun and a trivial amount of marijuana; he was arrested and subsequently released without being charged with a crime. He was an honorably discharged Marine combat veteran and -- of infinitely greater importance -- a gainfully employed, married father of two children. 

There's no reason to believe that anything other than a conventional search warrant -- served by officers who aren't kitted out in paramilitary drag, who knock on the door, identify themselves, and display the document in question before gaining entry -- was either necessary or appropriate. This could have been done with minimal risk to everyone involved. 

If a routine search warrant had been executed on the morning of May 5, the substantive result would have been the same: The police would have found no evidence of criminal activity. The most important difference, of course, would be that Vanessa would still have a husband, and her children -- grade school student Jose, Jr. , and toddler Joel -- would still have their father. Instead, Jose was a victim of criminal homicide at the hands of a Pima County Sheriff's Office (PCSO) SWAT team. 

At the time of the raid, Jose had just finished a twelve-hour shift at the local Asarco copper mine; he was startled awake by terrified cries from his wife, Vanessa, who told him that there were armed men laying siege to their home. Jose told her to hide in a closet with their four-year-old son, Joel. 

When the intruders burst into the home, Jose was in his boxer shorts and reportedly was holding an AR15 rifle, which he never discharged -- contrary to the SWAT team's initial report, which was that Jose had fired on them. His wife, who claims that she had never seen the gun before, initially told investigating detectives that it had been "thrown" next to Jose's body. Whether or not Jose actually pointed the gun, the invaders flung a total of 71 rounds in his direction, twenty-two of which hit him. 

Significantly, none of the wounds, as described in the official Medical Examiner's report, appears to have been a killshot. Jose was grazed in the head, and wounded in the extremities. One round penetrated a lung and his spleen, causing a hemorrhage. The same report notes that there was "no evidence of medical intervention," despite the fact that one member of the SWAT team -- deputy Jay Korza -- is a medic, and paramedics summoned by Vanessa's panicked 911 call arrived at the home mere minutes after the shooting. 



Rather than rendering or permitting medical aid to their victim, the SWAT team barricaded the crime scene while Jose bled to death. They didn't even confirm Jose's death directly. Instead, they deployed a camera-equipped remote-controlled robot to investigate, and then obtained an official pronouncement by telephone from a SWAT team physician who was miles from the scene. 


The likelihood that Jose could have survived if the SWAT team had provided timely medical care elevates this crime from simple homicide to second degree murder through depraved indifference. But the guilty parties here aren't limited to the trigger-pullers who spilled Jose's blood: Given that there was no legal justification for a military raid in the first place, the policy-makers responsible for signing off on it are just as guilty as the people who carried out those orders.

In a petulant and self-serving television interview with local ABC affiliate KGUN, Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik insisted that the SWAT raid was entirely "appropriate," and that since Jose was "part of a very violent organization, we considered it high risk." 

As helmet camera video of the raid documents, the comportment of the  SWAT team was not what one would expect from police carrying out a "high risk" mission against a potentially violent criminal. Music can be heard playing in the background; the mood of the SWAT operators seems more like what would be expected of a sports team preparing for a pickup basketball game, rather than combat-ready tactical specialists steeling themselves to confront a dangerous offender. 


Furthermore, Dupnik's rationale for the "high risk" operation is contradicted by Michael Storie, the attorney representing Jose's killers. Asked if Jose's previous arrest played a role in the SWAT team's strategy in carrying out the raid, Storie replied: "No. They didn't know anything about it and they didn't even know Guerena would be in the house at the time they approached."


What this means, apparently, is that a SWAT team was sent to carry out a combat-style raid against a home the team believed was  occupied only by a young mother and her four-year-old child. The task force investigating Jose knew his work schedule and his family's daily routine; did it neglect to share that information with the SWAT team? Was that intelligence deliberately withheld?


Nothing was "mishandled" here, maintains Sheriff Dupnik, ignorant of the fact that once incompetence is eliminated as an explanation, we're left with something can only be regarded as sinister -- and criminal.

 The public shouldn't be alarmed over the raid that killed Jose Guerena, the Sheriff assured KGUN, since "We average about 50 of these searches" every year. Wouldn't this mean that there is a SWAT raid of this kind taking place practically every week in Pima County? In light of what happened on May 5, should Pima County residents receive these tidings with relief, or apprehension?


"This was an unfortunate situation that was provoked by the person himself," Dupnik maintained, asserting that this is the inevitable outcome when someone points an "assault rifle" at cops. A more honest person would acknowledge that the SWAT operators first pointed their weapons at Jose when they had no cause or justification to do so, and that it's always a bad idea to invade a home occupied by a young mother with a toddler. 

Dupnik, however, was too busy wallowing in self-pity to spare any sympathy for the young father who was slaughtered on the floor of his own home: "Unfortunately, in this particular case, the printed media ... for whatever reason, decided to beat Dupnik up, over the head, with a sledge hammer...."


Sending a paramilitary death squad to bust down a door and hurl lead in every direction is conscientious police work; criticizing the synapse-challenged apparatchik responsible for such atrocities is something akin to criminal assault. Is everybody clear on this? 

Dupnik's casually defamatory statement that Jose Guerena was part of a "very violent organization" isn't supported by evidence, and will never be proven in court. Since Jose was killed before being charged with a crime, his innocence will forever remain an unimpeachable legal fact. However, it is a moral certainty that Clarence Dupnik is the chieftain of a "very violent organization" that can kill innocent people with impunity.

The search warrant affidavit that lead to the May 5 raids in Tucson -- a tapestry of supposition held together by begged questions -- purports to describe a large, well-organized narcotics smuggling operation involving Jose's older brother and other relatives. 

The PCSO's Special Investigative Unit (SIU) investigated Jose and the others for about two years, including six months of relentless, highly intrusive surveillance. This included wiretaps, stakeouts, and detailed scrutiny of household finances. The central figure in the investigation appears to have been Jose's older brother, Alejandro, who did have a criminal history (albeit one not involving mala en se). 

Suspicions were piqued by the fact that this group of Mexican-Americans, most of whom received welfare, appeared to be living beyond their means -- which, while exceedingly unwise, is neither a crime nor uncommon, even in post-Bubble America. Jose, according to his wife, was the kind of frugal provider who made birthday pinatas for their son, rather than buying them. The affidavit insists that none of the subjects appeared to be gainfully employed. That statement is offered despite the fact that the same affidavit acknowledges that Jose, who retired from the Marine Corps several years ago, worked long hours at the copper mine.


Despite the depth of their suspicions and the extent of their investigation, the affidavit admits: "During the SIU surveillance concerning the aforementioned subjects [that is, Jose and the others], they were not observed handling or even in the proximity of narcotics."

The functionary who filed the affidavit, identified only as "Detective Tisch,"offers a litany of excuses for the absence of tangible evidence of the drug trafficking ring he and his comrades had purportedly identified. 

Some "drug traffickers are aware that electronic communications are subject to law enforcement interception ... [and therefore] prefer most transactions to be in person," he writes in lines 123-124 of the affidavit. Where and when did those transactions occur? Ahem -- well, you see, "it is your Affiant's belief ... that suspects who are involved in drug trafficking are aware that law enforcement officers conduct surveillance of their residences, their businesses, and their activities" -- so none of the deals would go down in any of those places, y'see. 

Well, why not stalk those insidious people to the secret lairs wherein they ply their insidious trade? Ah, gee, well, as much as I'd love to, Tisch stammers in print, drug dealers "are conscious of being followed by law enforcement officers and are therefore difficult to follow." All right  -- what about the fact that the SIU had terrifyingly detailed access to the financial records of those whom they were investigating? "Narcotic traffickers often use financial habits designed to minimize and hide a paper trail," Tisch wrote by way of prefacing information about the earnings, finances, employment histories, properties, and clothing purchases of Jose and Alejandro Guerena and the others. 

The most significant "evidence" of Jose's supposed involvement in the alleged drug ring was the fact that he was found in the possession of a large quantity of plastic wrap during a 2009 traffic stop. In a fashion reminiscent of Don Quixote seeing malevolent giants where windmills placidly plied the Iberian skies, Detective Tisch wrote that "it is your Affiant's belief that saran-type wrap is commonly used to wrap and rewrap marijuana for ease of transportation...." It was subsequently discovered that this illicit "masking material" had actually been used to wrap furniture at the home of Jose Guerena's mother. 


After paring away all of the officious persiflage that litters this document, here is the "evidence" is presented to the judge: 

This small group of Mexican-Americans in Tucson, who include some people with criminal records, has money and assets we believe, but cannot prove, are the proceeds of drug trafficking. The only way we can prove this is by deploying a military strike force to kick in doors and collect the evidence that we cannot find through legitimate police methods. A judge quite generously responded to that request by issuing a hunting license to the local SWAT team and calling it a "search warrant." 


The affidavit demanded permission to seize all "fruits, instrumentalities and evidence of the [drug-related] crimes" allegedly carried out by the purported marijuana trafficking ring. 
Although the PCSO "rip crew" found no evidence of any kind in Jose's home, they were nothing if not thorough: Among the supposedly "drug-related" items they plundered from the home were Vanessa's wedding ring and Jose's combat medals from his service in Iraq. 


Once again, this detail offers critical insights into the mindset and priorities behind the May 5 atrocity. This wasn't the behavior of people sworn to protect individual rights and private property; it was the opportunistic avarice of officially sanctioned thieves who consider themselves legally entitled to a cut of anything of value they can find. 

This is why Detective Tisch's affidavit (like any other document of its kind) should be seen as a report filed by a thief casing coveted properties on behalf of a home invasion ring: These people have a bunch of nice stuff; all we have to do is find a plausible excuse to steal it from them. 

 That's how the "War on Drugs" operates at the local level. For law enforcement agencies, the objective isn't to abolish drug trafficking, or even to impede it significantly; rather, it is to maximize the institutional profits they derive from prohibition. 

One properly notorious example is on display on Interstate 40 in Tennessee, where officers from two drug task forces prowl the highway in search of  cash they can seize through civil asset forfeiture.


Dutifully reciting the prescribed catechism, Kim Helper, District Attorney for Tennessee's 21st Judicial District, insists that the highway robbery scheme is "a way for us to continue to fund our operations so that we can put an end to drug trafficking and the drug trade within this district." Of course, those two objectives -- "continued funding" and "an end to drug trafficking" -- are mutually incompatible. 

Officers assigned to the task force often ignore actual narcotics shipments, choosing instead to focus almost exclusively on seizing money. This means concentrating on the westbound side of the highway, where the cash is believed to be found, rather than the eastbound lane, which is supposedly used to shuttle drugs in from Mexico. 

As Nashville's CBS affiliate reports, the salaries paid to the officers involved in this highway robbery ring are paid directly out of the cash and other assets seized by them; this means that police often find themselves competing to stop and shake down the same cars, sometimes nearly coming to blows in the process. 

The Patron Saint of narcotics task forces is 19th Century NYPD Officer Alexander "Clubber" Williams, who created an immensely lucrative fiefdom in a precinct ripe with vice and graft of every conceivable variety. 

Clubber's exuberant corruption made for good press copy, which was made even livelier by his compulsive quotability. "There is more law in the end of a policeman's nightstick than in a decision of the Supreme Court," he explained when he was criticized about his penchant for brutality. It was his proprietary brand of glib shamelessness that gave New York's vice district its name: "All my life I have never had anything but chuck steak. Now I'm gonna get me some tenderloin." 

Like the contemporary drug warriors who are his institutional progeny, Williams knew that vice cannot be eradicated through state coercion -- but that the "war" against it can be immensely profitable. As Professor Alfred W. McCoy of the University of Wisconsin-Madison points out, through drug prohibition, police act as "an informal regulator, controlling the volume of vice trading and setting the level of syndication"; this results in the creation of "powerful syndicates and a high volume of illicit activity." 

To see a splendid example of the process Dr. McCoy describes, all that is necessary is to cast our eyes to the south. Since 2006, the Mexican front of Washington's drug war has claimed more than 40,000 lives. It has militarized that country's law enforcement culture, thereby generating substantial profits for the corporate affiliates of Washington's National Security State. The inflated profits resulting from prohibitionist policies have likewise been a boon to the banking sector, both in Mexico and globally. The cartels themselves are thriving, diversifying, and expanding their institutional reach both into the U.S. and Central America.

This symbiosis police agencies and the vice cartels they help create enriches criminal kingpins on both sides. The consequences of this cynical charade are often lethal for innocent people needlessly targeted by  State-licensed thugs armed with combat-grade weaponry and imbued with the scruples of Clubber Williams.


The second hour of last week's installment of Pro Libertate Radio was devoted to the murder of Jose Guerena. Go here to listen.










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Dum spiro, pugno!

He Didn't Say "Infidels": Homeland Security Theater, Continued

The word has a very distinct connotation. There's nothing else that quite captures it.... Give me one word that captures the same image. One word. You name it, and I will use it. --

Defense attorney Robin Weathers arguing for the admissibility of a profoundly vulgar epithet involving the emunctory orifice in the film From the Hip.


A few months after Iraqi national Waad Ramadan Alwan was allowed to immigrate to the U.S. as a refugee, he found himself unwittingly cast in a leading role in yet another installment of Homeland Security Theater. 

Someone identified in the criminal complaint as a "Confidential Human Source" (CHS) in the FBI's employ -- that is, a bit player from the Bureau's large and ever-expanding troupe of agent provocateurs and "terrorism facilitators" -- approached then-28-year-old Alwan to recruit him into an effort to aid mujahadeen fighters in Iraq.

The script written by the Louisville Joint Terrorism Task Force called for the FBI's asset to pose as a representative of an unnamed "Hajii" with connections to Iraqi insurgents. After Alwan had been lured into the pseudo-plot, the role-playing stooge added a final decorative detail by claiming that he received money from Osama bin Laden -- a claim that neither impressed nor interested the Iraqi, according to the account provided in the criminal complaint.

The Bureau's bit player proposed that Alwan, who had taken up residence in Bowling Green, Kentucky, help train Iraqi insurgents in the manufacture and use of IEDs, and assist in smuggling weapons and a large amount of money to Iraq.

Alwan was let into the country in April 2009. A few weeks later, 21-year-old Iraqi
Mohanad Shareef Hammadi, who would be recruited by Alwan into the federally-choreographed "conspiracy," arrived in the U.S. The FBI operation began just a few weeks later after Alwan's arrival. The criminal complaint against Alwan states that he began "notionally assisting" the supposed plot "beginning in 2010."

Alwan.

 At least 19,000 Iraqi refugees were admitted to the United States that year; why was Alwan of particular interest to the Bureau? One possible answer is found in the fact that Alwan, a one-time employee at an electrical plant in Bayji, was a known insurgent.

From 2003-2006 Alwan took part in a number of ambushes involving IEDs, and was arrested by security personnel after one operation went awry. His fingerprints had been found on a wireless telephone base station used in an IED that failed to go off. That dud IED was found by occupation forces in September 2005.


Federal prosecutors have charged Alwan and Hammadi with several crimes -- including "Conspiracy to Use a Weapon of Mass Destruction," a category of armaments that includes any destructive device, no matter how trivial its yield, fashioned by anybody other that the United States government. The prosecutors refuse to say why the two Iraqis were let into the country, whether Alwan's arrest in Iraq was known to federal officials, or what prompted the Bureau to target them for a "sting" operation. 


Res ipsa loquitir: Alman and Hammadi were allowed to enter the U.S. for the precise purpose of being lured into an FBI false flag operation. That conclusion is suggested by the circumstantial evidence in this specific case, and justified by the fact that every significant "terrorist plot" supposedly disrupted by the FBI since 9/11 has been a Federal Government production. 

In making its pitch to potential patsies, the FBI is too smart to appeal to the seething hatred of all infidels that supposedly festers inside  every young Muslim male. Instead, they exploit the perfectly understandable and thoroughly human resentment provoked by Washington's invasion and occupation of Muslim countries. 

Were Peter King -- former fundraiser for the most violent faction of the terrorist IRA -- an honest man rather than a feckless demagogue, his hearings regarding the "radicalization of American Muslims" would focus on the unparalleled success enjoyed by the FBI in recruiting once-peaceable Muslim men into ersatz terrorist plots. The Bureau has isolated a formula that works: Rather than trying to rile up Muslims over the decadence of American culture and the general impudence of the infidels, FBI-trained provocateurs focus instead on the horrific human cost of Washington's foreign policy.

Hammadi.

In the case of Alwan and Hammadi, the Regime was given the gift of two young Iraqi males who had already been pre-radicalized as a result of their life experiences. 


Alwan was born in 1981 -- the year after Saddam Hussein, in his role as Washington's regional subcontractor, began his war with Iran -- with Washington's covert encouragement and material assistance. Alwan was still in diapers when the Reagan administration removed Saddam's government from the roster of terrorism-supporting regimes, which permitted Washington to begin plying Baghdad with military and financial aid.

When Alwan was two years old, Donald Rumsfeld visited Baghdad as a presidential emissary, laden with promises of subsidies, military aid, and other forms of material and moral support. This included transfers of dual-use technology to Iraqi nuclear facilities, and tacit support for Iraq's development and use of chemical weapons (even though Washington acknowledged that this would provoke Iran to expand its own use of chemical munitions).

In 1984, when Alwan was a toddler, President Reagan issued National Security Decision Directive 139, which made preventing the "collapse" of Saddam's abominable police state a strategic priority.

Although  -- or, perhaps, because -- the war turned out disastrously for Iraq, Saddam continued to be a specially favored beneficiary of Washington's imperial largesse until literally the eve of the 1991 Persian Gulf War. During the 12-year intermission in the Persian Gulf war, Washington imposed a deadly embargo that further entrenched Saddam's rule while consigning hundreds of thousands of young Iraqis -- many of them Alwan's age -- to an early death through avoidable illness or starvation. 



Like millions of other Iraqis of the same age, Alwan has no memory of a time when his country wasn't either at war with Washington, or involved in a war as a result of Washington's chicanery. During the 1990s, his country was ravaged by a murderous embargo that was punctuated with airstrikes and missile assaults, even as Washington very thoughtfully cattle-penned Saddam's domestic opposition and allowed the dictator to slaughter them (something made clear in the account offered by former CIA operative Robert Baer).

Trench combat in the Iran-Iraq War.

Alwan was 22 years old when the distant government that had visited such favors on his country  invaded Iraq to remove the middleman. In a fit of ingratitude that would be inexplicable to neo-conservatives and others unfamiliar with the rudiments of human motivation, Alwan was among those who chose to greet the "liberators" with IEDs and high-velocity rounds fired from a sniper rifle, rather than flowers and sweets. 


The people on the receiving end of Alwan's attacks were Americans. They should not have been there. They had no right to be there, and no authority -- moral or legal -- to employ violence to force Iraqis like Alwan to submit to them. The policymakers who sent them to Iraq, thereby putting them in a morally untenable and physically vulnerable position, are criminals who should be put in the dock for mass murder and crimes against the Constitution. 

Donald Rumsfeld (l) helped Saddam obtain weapons later used to kill Americans.

 The grand jury indictment against Alwan accuses him of conspiring to murder "United States nationals outside the United States" by using "weapons of mass destruction" -- that is, crude, low-yield IEDs. 

The sight of an American who has been maimed, blinded, or killed by an IED set by an Iraqi insurgent is unbearable, and this moral conclusion is just as unavoidable: The people who set that charge aren't terrorists -- they're patriots fighting on their home soil against a prohibitively stronger foreign aggressor. If America were on the receiving end of a similar "liberation," American patriots would provide a similar welcome to our uninvited benefactors. 

In a typically onanistic and self-congratulatory statement announcing the arrests of Alwan and Hammadi, David J. Hale, U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Kentucky, said that the Feds are prepared "to pursue terrorists wherever in the United States they may be found.... Whether they seek shelter in a major metropolitan area or in a smaller city in Kentucky, those who would attempt to harm or kill Americans abroad will face a determined and prepared law enforcement effort ... to bring them to justice." (Emphasis added.) 


Note well that these two purported terrorists were not accused of plotting to kill unsuspecting Americans anywhere within the United States; they were allegedly plotting to kill the heavily armed, well-protected military personnel who still occupy their home country. If they had been consumed by an unconquerable desire to smite the American infidels wherever they could be found, they had no shortage of opportunities here.

In any case, rather than congratulating the Feds for their vigilance, we should be demanding to know why they knowingly permitted Alman, a purported mass murder, into the country to begin with. After all, isn't the supposed purpose of occupying Iraq to "fight them there, so we don't have to fight them here"? But, once again, the critical fact is that these Iraqis had no interest in pursuing vengeance against Americans who are simply minding our own business.

As one telling exchange with the FBI's agent provocateur illustrates, Alwan didn't lavish hostility on all infidels, or even on Americans in general; instead, he apparently focused it on a small, selective sub-population.


During a meeting last November 8, according to the criminal complaint, the FBI's undercover asset told Alwan "to pick up weapons from a storage facility, place them in bags, and deliver them" to a waiting vehicle. 

"You will be shocked with the RPGs," the provocateur boasted. "It is almost like you see in the movies."


"Yes, the a**holes built it?" Alwan inquired, prompting the FBI's stooge to reply, "Yeah, yeah -- it is American."


That epithet, once again, wasn't "infidels." It's also pretty clear that Alman wasn't applying that insult to Americans in general, but rather to those he blamed for turning his country into a perpetual spectacle of violence, disease, terror, and tyranny.  Why wouldn't he perceive such people as -- well, you know...?


Every human being has the potential to earn that designation, and nearly all of us qualify at some point in our lives. Government, said James Madison, is the "largest of all reflections on human nature." Given that the behavior of human beings invested with power is invariably asinine rather than angelic, Madison's metaphor would work better if it employed a proctoscope, rather than a mirror. 

If I take his meaning correctly, Alman wasn't even necessarily referring to the foreign troops occupying his country, but rather to the craven and despicable policymakers who had sent them there, and the corporatist parasites who profit from State-orchestrated bloodshed -- which includes the death and dismemberment of American troops sent somewhere they didn't belong to carry out a mission they shouldn't have been given against a population that never harmed or threatened us in any way.


In describing people capable of orchestrating atrocities of that kind, there simply isn't a suitable substitute for the expression Alman employed.

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Dum spiro, pugno!