The Stalinist in the White House

In the fashion of Caesar thrice refusing the crown even as he assumed dictatorial powers, tyrants will occasionally engage in self-aggrandizement disguised as self-deprecation. Barack Obama offered a moment of that kind last week when, in reply to a question about the budget sequester posed by a media sycophant, he said, “I’m not a dictator.”

Obama wasn’t serious, of course. He does consider himself a dictator, albeit one whose term in office is limited, at least for now.

Obama might not lock the doors of the Oval Office and force Republican congressional leaders to carry out budget negotiations, but – as his Attorney General made clear in a letter to Senator Rand Paul – he considers himself duly empowered to carry out the summary execution of U.S. citizens on American soil if he deems such action necessary. 

In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee today, Holder made it clear that the president he serves answers to nobody, and is bound by no laws, in carrying out extra-judicial killings, either within U.S. borders or beyond them. Expressing a point of view familiar to students of Soviet Russia under the reign of Stalin, Holder maintained that the purpose of the law is to prevent anybody – whether an individual citizen, a judge, or a legislative body – from restraining the exercise of presidential will. 

“Do you believe Congress can pass a law prohibiting [the President] to use lethal force on U.S. soil?” Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa asked Holder. If we still resided in something resembling a constitutional republic, that question itself would be perverse: Congress wouldn’t need to pass a law to prevent something that the law doesn’t authorize the president to do.

 Furthermore, as civil liberties activist Marcy Wheeler points out, Grassley’s question wasn’t intended to suggest a general prohibition against “targeted killings,” but rather one that “would apply only where a person did not present an imminent threat.” In other words, Grassley was willing to concede that the president could order summary executions after addressing some trivial formalities about the dire necessity of such action.

But even this would be too restrictive, according to Holder. 

“I’m not sure that such a bill would be constitutional,” he told Grassley. “It might run contrary to the Article II powers that the President has.” In other words, Holder is claiming that the President, as Commander-in-Chief of the military, can order the military (or, presumably, the CIA) to carry out an extra-judicial execution of a U.S. citizen on American soil – and Congress would be forbidden by the Constitution (whatever that word means to Holder and his ilk) from preventing such action. 

Domestic use of the military as a law enforcement agency is forbidden by the Third Amendment and the Posse Comitatus Act. This means nothing to the budding Stalinist occupying the Oval Office. 

For the Obama-centric Left, as it was for the Bush-centric Right, the U.S. President is the “Living Constitution.” His power is limited only by the resources at his command, and the extent of his sadistic imagination. Thomas Jefferson – in an essay promoting what we are told is the subversive and un-American doctrine of “interposition” – warned that “confidence in men” is a “dangerous delusion” that is fatal to liberty. Today, collectivists of the Right and Left insist that this is true only on those occasions when power is exercised by people associated with the other faction. 

Perhaps this is an unfair and overbroad characterization. There are some prominent figures who can abandon partisan attachments in defense of principle. Regrettably, this usually means that party labels are discarded in favor of an unabashed embrace of the non-partisan Warfare State, and the principles being applied are entirely depraved. Witness the fact that many conservative commentators, rather than condemning Obama for assuming the powers of a literal dictator, have actually applauded him. Among them is John Bolton, who represented the Bush administration in the United Nations, who admits that Obama’s drone strike program “is consistent with, and derived from, the Bush administration approach to the war on terror.” In Bolton’s opinion, the drone-killing program is “entirely sensible.”

Barack Obama murdered this young man.

Channeling the spirit of a Stalin-era Communist Party apparatchik, South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsay Graham has proposed a resolution applauding the administration’s drone-killing program and urging all of his Republican colleagues to express their support. Graham has explicitly commended the administration for the summary execution of U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, who was murdered (no other word is suitable) by a drone strike in Yemen without ever being charged with a crime. Graham hasn’t said whether he considers the murder of Anwar’s 16-year-old son Abdelrahman to be a similar triumph of statecraft. 

More remarkable still was the reaction of John Yoo, a former Bush-era Justice Department functionary who now teaches law at the University of California-Berkeley. Seven years before Eric Holder claimed that Congress has no authority to rein in Obama’s power of discretionary killing, Yoo breezily claimed that no law or treaty could prevent President Bush from ordering the sexual mutilation of a child in order to extract information from the victim’s parents. 

Yoo employed a Wall Street Journal op-ed column to criticize the Obama “white paper” that sets out the guidelines for drone attacks – not because it gives unaccountable discretionary killing power to the president and his subordinates, but because it supposedly extends due process to “enemy combatants.” Yoo complains that the paper “suggests” that U.S. citizens like Anwar al-Awlaki “enjoy due process rights. By doing so, it dissipates the rights of the law-abiding at home.” 

Presumably, Yoo’s concerns have been placated by Holder’s unflinching assertion that the president has unqualified authority to murder Americans anywhere, for any reason he deems suitable. 

Senator Angus King of Maine has proposed the institutionalization of the drone program through creation of a special court that would be modeled after the tribunal that issues warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (or FISA).  The FISA court, significantly, issues warrants after surveillance has begun. In similar fashion, Senator Young’s proposed court would review decisions to carry out drone strikes after the missiles had flown and the targeted individual had been killed. This proposal has been criticized by some congressional Republicans – once again, not because it represents a concession to tyrannical power, but rather because it supposedly inhibits the exercise of that power, if only by acknowledging that the power is subject to some form of independent scrutiny. 

Until the filibuster staged by Senator Paul – who, despite his plentiful shortcomings, has proven that he has learned much from his heroic father – no Senate Republican had rejected the Stalinist premise that the President can order the summary execution of U.S. citizens. What about the Professional Left – the people who, like then-Senator Obama, were so agitated over the Bush administration’s crimes against the Bill of Rights? They’re too busy debating such weighty matters as the proper honorific by which to address the Dear Leader, or helping the Southern Poverty Law Center draw up “kill lists” of domestic “extremists.”

 

About a week ago, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland insisted that Washington would maintain its embargo of Cuba because the regime ruling that island continues to be a “state sponsor of terrorism.” Unlike the Regime for which Nuland speaks, the Cuban government doesn’t occupy a foot of foreign territory, nor does it use robot aircraft to rain death from the skies on neighborhoods halfway around the world. 

In its 2011 human rights report on Cuba, the agency that issues Nuland’s paycheck described its government as a “totalitarian state” ruled by a military hierarchy that routinely commits criminal violence against the innocent. All of that is true, of course. Interestingly, the document admitted that in 2011, “There were no reports that the government or its agents committed arbitrary or unlawful killings.” The same cannot be said of the Regime that employs Nuland, which in the same year murdered hundreds of people in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Yemen. Among those “arbitrary [and] unlawful killings” were the summary executions of at least three U.S. citizens, including a 16-year-old boy. And now the chief law enforcement officer of the Obama Regime insists that the “law” would forbid Congress to restrain the Dear Leader from carrying out the extra-judicial killings of U.S. citizens. 

While it’s true that Cuba remains mired in poverty and still lives under the reign of a thoroughly despicable ruling clique, we really must confront this question:

 By what standard is the government of Cuba totalitarian, if the Regime in Washington is not?

Notes and Asides  

For the past few months I have been writing the daily newscast for the Next News Network. This is a job that occupies anywhere from 20-30 hours each week, and -- to be blunt -- it pays about what I earned as a teenager working at JB's Big Boy. I think it's a very worthwhile undertaking, but it doesn't provide anywhere near enough to support a family of eight. As things stand right now, I'm having a difficult time keeping the lights on and my telephone connected. We are deeply thankful for all of the generous help we've received -- and would very much appreciate any help we can get. Thanks again -- and God bless!

 

Dum spiro, pugno!

"For Your Own Protection"

There is no situation that cannot be made instantly and immeasurably worse through police intervention. A splendid illustration of this principle is found in a recent ruling from the the Arkansas Court of Appeals.

According to the court, police were entitled to arrest, taze, and beat a teenager who had done nothing more sinister than speak to his mother on the street in front of their home. A police officer accosted the young man – who, as a juvenile, is identified only by the initials “R.R.” -- after he saw him approaching a woman who was walking a dog. 

The officer, who belongs to a social cohort of people who are distinguished primarily by their timidity, claimed that he was “concerned for the woman’s safety.” His fears should have been allayed when it was established that the woman was the teenager’s mother. 

If the cop had been an actual peace officer, he would have tipped his hat and left. But he was a law enforcer – that is, someone through whose dark ministrations innocent people are transformed into “criminals” – and so he insisted on detaining and interrogating the entirely harmless youngster. To that end he sent for “backup,” and a thugscrum soon coalesced around the puzzled and terrified teen. 

As the Court of Appeals summarizes, R.R. was “tasered several times, removed from the backseat [of a police vehicle], thrown to the ground, tasered again, kicked, handcuffed, and arrested.” All of this was done because the young man “moved around and wrestled around while the officers held him on the ground, making it difficult for the officers to put the cuffs on him.” 

Because he didn’t permit himself to be shackled like a slave in front of his own home because he had been seen speaking to his mother, the teenager committed the supposed crime of “refusing to submit to arrest.” 

The trial court in the case also acknowledged that the victim was “a fine young man, an excellent student, and active in sports, clubs and church activities.” The judge reportedly expressed dismay that “an innocent situation … just completely got out of hand” – which is, once again, the familiar and entirely predictable outcome when members of the State’s enforcement caste materialize. Despite these superficial expressions of regret, the Judge sentenced the victim to serve one day in detention – thereby leaving him with a criminal record because he had been on the receiving end of a state-aggravated assault.  

Like most communities in its section of the country, Pope County, Arkansas, where that incident occurred, is thickly populated with Evangelical Christians, whose numbers probably include most elected officials, prosecutors, judges, and police officers. At some point in Sunday School they probably read the 22^nd chapter of the Book of Acts, which describes how the Apostle Paul, accused of disturbing the peace, was arrested by Roman occupation soldiers and taken to a local barracks to be questioned under scourging.

As the interrogator was preparing to whip the apostle, Paul pointed out to the centurion in charge that it was illegal to flog a Roman citizen unless he had been tried and convicted of a crime. This objection caused the interrogator to desist immediately, and prompted the officer in command to express the fear that he could face criminal charges because he had chained – that is, handcuffed – a Roman citizen.

 Every day in this supposedly free country, police commit an act that was impermissible for their antecedents in imperial Rome: In the name of “officer safety,” they handcuff American citizens who are not criminal suspects while conducting investigations. Police also routinely inflict summary punishment – using batons, Tasers, pepper spray, or other means – against those who resist being detained without cause. Within a few years police will have at their disposal handcuffs that can impart electrical shocks to detainees.

In an 1894 essay published by The Strand Magazine, Inspector Maurice Moser of Scotland Yard wrote that the earliest historical mention of handcuffs was in the fourth century B.C., “when soldiers of a conquering Greek army found among the baggage of the routed Carthaginians several chariots full of handcuffs, which had been held ready in confident anticipation of a multitude of prisoners.”

“My personal experience of handcuffs is small, because I dislike them,” wrote Inspector Moser of the restraints. He pointed out that in Belgium, which at the time was the seat of a substantial empire, “the use of handcuffs by police is entirely forbidden.” 

Like most police officers of his era, Moser was a relatively civilized man who found the act of shackling another human being to be barbarous and punitive. Handcuffing a human being certainly doesn’t enhance the safety of the person being restrained. Nor does it relieve police anxieties about the all-encompassing threat to that most sacred of considerations, “officer safety.” Witness the large and ever-growing number of cases in which officers – almost always in the plural, of course – beat, taze, pepper-spray, and even shoot suspects who have already been handcuffed. 

Last summer, police in Aurora, Colorado indiscriminately handcuffed and detained scores of people for the space of more than four hours following an armed robbery at a branch of Wells Fargo bank. 

According to Officer Frank Fania, drivers and passengers in the vicinity “were handcuffed, then were told what was going on and were asked for permission to search the car. They all granted permission, and once nothing was found in their cars, they were un-handcuffed.”

Aurora, Colorado, June 2012.

 Once the victims were handcuffed, of course, they had no choice but to grant “permission” for their abductors to paw through their vehicles. What if they had withheld consent? What if they had refused to endure the indignity and injury of being handcuffed in the first place? 

Fania insisted that the mass arrests were necessary and justified because it was a “unique” situation. But it’s more honestly described as mass application of the standard approach to “protective” detention of individuals who are not criminal suspects. 

Owing to the semantic deviousness of police and prosecutors, citizens are increasingly unsure of their status when they are accosted by police: Are they under arrest, or subject to “investigatory detention”?  If the citizen isn’t formally under arrest, is he free to leave? Can police draw their guns and threaten a citizen with lethal force if he is not formally under arrest?

That last question has been addressed in a recent ruling by Louisiana’s Fifth Circuit Court of Appeal, which held that those circumstances do not constitute a formal arrest – at least when the legitimacy of that arrest is questioned by the defendant.

On June 8, 2010, Robert Carter of Jefferson Parish, Louisiana parked outside a convenience store. Acting on a tip from a snitch that Carter would soon arrive at the location to conduct a drug deal, two undercover detectives had kept the lot under surveillance. After Carter parked his car, the detectives used their unmarked vehicles to cut off his escape and approached him with guns drawn.

In a panic, Carter threw his car into reverse, severely damaging the unmarked car behind him.

During his bench trial, Carter claimed that the arrival of two armed men – one of whom admitted in testimony that they didn’t clearly identify themselves as police – made him fear for his life. After being convicted of felony malicious property damage, Carter – a second offender – was sentenced to 20 years in prison. On appeal, Carter insisted that the arrest was unlawful.

In a remarkable achievement in judicial sophistry, the appeals court ruled that what it called an “investigative detention” is not an arrest – while insisting that Carter had no right to leave what the trial judge called “the arrested place [where] he’s supposed to remain.” In practical terms this means that cops are permitted to detain any citizen at gunpoint without such an action qualifying as an “arrest” – and therefore being subject to the restrictions supposedly guaranteed by the Fourth and Fifth amendments. Once the individual is detained, he can be shackled at the discretion of the officer – and then beaten, jailed, and prosecuted if he objects. 

The act of handcuffing another human being is a serious injury. When not done to restrain someone who has actually harmed another human being, handcuffing is a morally impermissible form of aggressive violence. It is meant to be a tangible demonstration of superiority that requires the victim to submit to the supposed authority of the aggressor. It is designed and intended to humiliate the victim. This is why it is done even to six-year-old inmates of government schools who are dragged away by police officers, nonagenarians who are abducted at gunpoint for neglecting to pay traffic tickets, or pregnant female inmates who are chained while giving birth. 

This is also why police who are charged with crimes are often spared being handcuffed out of “professional courtesy” – which in some cases has actually imperiled the arresting officer. 

In the American Soyuz, any of us, at the whim of an armed stranger in a government-issued costume, can find himself being treated in the same way that the Carthaginians treated captured prisoners of war. At least Carthaginian soldiers didn’t insult the intelligence of their victims by insisting that they were being shackled for their own “protection.” 

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