Cold War II: This Time, The Commies Are In Washington

 

How the Communist takeover was supposed to look, according to "Red Dawn" (1984) ...

The Regime in Washington is the only government asserting the supposed right to carry out summary executions anywhere on the face of the globe, so we shouldn’t be surprised to learn that it also claims the right to impose “sanctions” on foreign citizens who publicly criticize it. On March 11, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) added Russian academic Alexander Dugin to its roster of “individuals and entities to be sanctioned over Russia’s interference in Ukraine.” 

This decree means that any property belonging to Dugin that is within reach of the Soyuz (aka the country formerly known as the United States of America) is subject to forfeiture, and US citizens who do business with the professor will face criminal prosecution under the Trading with the Enemy Act. 

What did Dugin – a so-called “mad professor” who will inevitably be portrayed on film by Russell Crowe -- do that merits this designation? He holds no government position, nor is he the chieftain of a private criminal syndicate. Dugin, an outspoken Russian nationalist, has been depicted as a species of terrorist – the intellectual leader of a “revisionist” movement in Russia.

It is his use of the written and spoken word that provoked the outrage of the Trotskyites controlling Washington’s war-making apparatus. Dugin’s heretical rejection of Washington’s imperial rule-set made him “one of the most dangerous people on the planet,” according to noted geostrategic analyst Glenn Beck.

 

... what it really looks like (Anaheim, 2012).

In other words, Dugin – a citizen of a country with which the United States is not formally at war – was targeted for economic punishment as a thought criminal. He should consider himself fortunate that he hasn’t yet been targeted for a drone strike.

According to the OFAC, sanctions against Dugin and a dozen other figures were necessary in order to “hold accountable those responsible for violations of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

If that were the objective, Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland’s name would be at the top of the index of proscribed persons. A little more than a year ago, some might recall, Nuland was caught in the act of plotting to unseat Ukraine’s elected president and install a junta that would take dictation from Washington and the IMF.  

Nuland has apologized to EU leaders about whom she made disparaging remarks during the intercepted phone call with US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt – thereby acknowledging the authenticity of the recording. She has never apologized, to say nothing of being held accountable, for her role in violating “Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.” 

It appears that those in charge of the Regime, like their Soviet forebears, employ “Aesopian language” in their public pronouncements about foreign policy, much as Soviet ruler Leonid Brezhnev did in the September 1968 address outlining the doctrine that bore his name.

 “Without question, the peoples of the socialist countries and the Communist parties have and must have freedom to determine their country’s path of development,” explained Brezhnev in a sentence pregnant with the word “however.” 

“Any decisions they make, however” – there it is! – “must not be harmful either to socialism in their own country or to the fundamental interests of other socialist countries…. Whoever forgets this in giving exclusive emphasis to the autonomy and independence of Communist parties is guilty of a one-sided approach, and of shirking their internationalist duties…. The sovereignty of individual socialist countries cannot be set against the interests of world socialism and the world revolutionary movement.”

On this principle, Brezhnev insisted, the August 1968 Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia, in which hundreds were killed and a reformist government was destroyed, was not a violation of that country’s “socialist sovereignty,” but rather an enhancement thereof. 

The ruling elite in Washington and the EU see developments in Ukraine in the same light. The coup that ousted the country’s elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, was a responsible exercise in “internationalism”; the plebiscite that led to Crimean secession, by way of contrast, was an offense against the “world revolutionary movement” that must be punished through mass bloodshed. 

Brezhnevite language was recited by US Commissar for War Chuck Hagel during a surrealistic speech last October in which he claimed that the US and NATO “must deal with a revisionist Russia – with its modern and capable army – on NATO’s doorstep.”

Rear Adm. Kirby....

Rear Admiral John Kirby was given the unpalatable task of defending Hagel’s statement when asked about it by AP reporter Matt Lee.

“Is it not logical to look at this and say – the reason why Russia’s army is at NATO’s doorstep is because NATO has expanded, rather than Russia expanding?” a composed and visibly disgusted Lee asked of Kirby, whose twitchiness and flop sweat summoned inevitable comparisons to Nathan Thurm, the pathologically dishonest lawyer played by Martin Short.

“I think that’s the way President Putin probably looks at it – it is certainly not the way we look at it,” oozed Kirby by way of a non-reply.

“You don’t think that NATO has expanded eastward towards Russia?” Lee wearily persisted.

“NATO has expanded,” Kirby grudgingly admitted, before trying to deflect the conversation toward Russia’s supposed transgressions.

“It wasn’t NATO that was ordering tons of tactical battalions and army to the Ukraine border,” Kirby declared.

...Kirby's Spirit Animal, Nathan Thurm.

 “I am pretty sure that Ukraine is not a member of NATO – unless that’s changed,” Lee pointed out, while trying, without success, to get Kirby to admit the obvious  fact that “You are moving closer to Russia and you’re blaming the Russians for being close to NATO.”

Kirby began his exercise in baroque double-speak saying that Russia’s “intentions and motives” displayed an effort to call back “the glory days of the Soviet Union.” He ended by accusing Russia of aggression by moving troops within its own borders in response to US-abetted violence within a neighboring country.

There is nothing novel about Soviet-grade semantic engineering of this kind by a Pentagon spokesliar. In a November 2005 press conference, Donald Rumsfeld, who at the time was Chief Commissar for Aggression and Occupation -- or, as the position is more commonly known, Secretary of Defense – described what he called an “epiphany” regarding the resistance to the Regime’s humanitarian errand in Iraq.

“This is a group of people who don’t merit the word `insurgency,’ I think,” Comrade Rumsfeld pontificated. “I think that you can have a legitimate insurgency in a country that has popular support and has a cohesiveness and has a legitimate gripe. This people don’t have a legitimate gripe.”

This, too, was a familiar theme in Brezhnev-era official cant: Once the forces of “progress” have taken control of a country, all resistance is “counter-revolutionary,” because nobody could have a legitimate grievance.

How, then, were the Iraqi guerillas to be described, since the term “insurgents” was forbidden? Shortly before leaving for a scandal-abbreviated term as head of the World Bank, Rumsfeld’s deputy Paul Wolfowitz employed the orthodox Marxist expression “forces of reaction” to describe those ungrateful Iraqis who had taken up arms against the radiant forces of democratic liberation.

Language of this kind has a familiar odor to Russian nationalists like Dugin, who displays no nostalgia for the Soviet Union into which he was born in 1962.

“We distinguish between two different things: the American people and the American political elite,” Dugin explained a year ago in a “Letter to the American People on Ukraine.” “We sincerely love the first and we profoundly hate the second.”

“The American people [have their] own traditions, habits, values, ideals, options and beliefs that are their own,” he continues. “These grant to everybody the right to be different, to choose freely, to be what one wants to be and can be or become. It is a wonderful feature. It gives strength and pride, self-esteem and assurance. We Russians admire that.”

Brezhnev without the unibrow: Nuland.

Unfortunately, Dugin continues, the American political elite have their own version of the Brezhnev Doctrine under which respect for “diversity” is limited by the “international obligations” imposed by the Empire.

“The American political elite, above all on an international level, act quite contrary to [American] values,” Dugin asserts. “They insist on conformity and regard the American way of life as something universal and obligatory.”

Most Americans, Dugin correctly surmises, “sincerely think that the Russian nation was born with Communism, with the Soviet Union. But that is a total misconception. We are much older than that. The Soviet period was just a short epoch in our long history. We existed before the Soviet Union and we are existing after the Soviet Union.”

Ukraine, from Dugin’s perspective, is defined by a “multiplicity of identities,” the most important of which, to him, is Kiev’s role in the “genesis” of the Russian people. Eastern and western Ukraine, he contends, is historically and culturally part of “Greater Russia.” Contemporary Kiev and the western section of the country are more congenial to the West.

Apart from the ideological demands (and crony capitalist interests) of Washington and the EU, there is no reason why Ukraine cannot peacefully devolve into two or more political entities. The alternative is continuing, and escalating, the US-abetted civil war that increasingly appears to be a preliminary round in what could become a direct military conflict between Washington and Moscow.

“We have no thoughts of, or desire to, hurt America,” Dugin insists. “You want to be free. You and all others deserve it. But what the hell are you doing in the capital of ancient Russia, Victoria Nuland? Why do you intervene in our domestic affairs?... Any honest American calmly studying the case will arrive at the conclusion: `Let them decide for themselves. We are not similar to these strange and wild Russians, but let them go their own way. And we are going to go our own way.’”

Merely to suggest such a non-interventionist posture, Brezhnev’s disciples in Washington would object, is to “shirk our internationalist duties.”

“The American political elite has another agenda,” Dugin correctly observes. It is “to provoke wars, to mix in regional conflicts, to incite the hatred of different ethnic groups. The American political elite sacrifices the American people to causes that are far from you, vague, uncertain, and finally very, very bad…. They lie about us. And they lie about you. They give you a distorted image of yourself. The American political elite has stolen, perverted and counterfeited the American identity. And they make us hate you and they make you hate us.”

Dugin offers an alternative approach:

“Let us hate the American political elite together. Let us fight them for our identities – you for the American, us for the Russian, but the enemy in both cases is the same, the global oligarchy who rules the world using you and smashing us. Let us revolt. Let us resist. Together. Russians and Americans. We are the people. We are not their puppets.”

Sober and responsible people might find elements of Dugin’s worldview – and some of his past associations -- troubling or even repellent while finding his prognosis of current affairs to be sound and compelling.

One need not endorse what Dugin would like to build in his own country in order to appreciate the truths he tells about the people who are orchestrating a war that could destroy both our country and his. And the means used to criminalize Dugin for giving voice to impermissible thoughts is irrefutable proof that Washington, not Moscow, is home to the true heirs of Lenin’s totalitarian vision. 

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Criminal Violence as Political Theater: Standard Operating Procedure for the FBI

 

They collected them -- and probably sold them, too: Feds pose with firearms confiscated at the border.

“The Investigations Division of the Office of the Inspector General has thoroughly reviewed your allegations and concluded that the issues raised do not warrant an investigation by this office,” insisted the unsigned March 10 letter from the Justice Department.

The “allegations” and “issues” I had raised in my March 2 letter to Associate Deputy Attorney General David Margolis dealt with disclosures by former FBI undercover operative John Matthews about a federal “sting” operation in which AR-15 rifles – which had been converted to full-auto machine guns -- were illegally sold to narcotics-peddling motorcycle gangs through the Lone Wolf gun shop in Tucson, Arizona.  The key elements of Matthews’ account were confirmed by his former FBI handler, Donald Jarrett. The Justice Department’s exhaustive and definitive “review” of this matter took less than a week.

"Fixer": David Margolis (center).

Lone Wolf was  the same gun shop was bullied by the ATF into participating in the notorious “Fast and Furious” operation, through which firearms were illegally provided to agents of Mexican drug cartels. That initiative was inspired by the cynical calculation that an engineered increase in “gun-related violence” would create political pressure to impose new restrictions on firearms ownership.

“With the number of guns we let walk, we’ll never know how many people were killed, raped, robbed,” lamented ATF agent John Dodson, who was involved in the operation.

“Fast and Furious” was an exercise in abetting criminal violence for the purpose of political theater, and it was neither the first nor the last federal venture of that kind. During the 1990s, Matthews – a Vietnam veteran who is dying from exposure to Agent Orange -- was an infiltrator and informant in the FBI’s PATCON (Patriot Conspiracy) operation, which he suggests was a progenitor of “Fast and Furious.” 

Rather than discrediting Matthews’ allegations, the Justice Department’s careful and fastidious “review” has tacitly validated them: The letter I was sent didn’t dismiss those claims as false or exaggerated, it simply said they did “not warrant an investigation.” This is because the actions Matthews described are entirely unexceptional – they are standard operating procedure for the FBI. 

Disillusioned snitch: John Matthews.

“As we talk of gun control … over the years [of] how many cases of sporterized SKS, AK47s, and SKSs were sold to groups and case after case of ammo for them all with the blessings of the FBI & ATF with no paper work,” Matthews wrote in a November 8, 2014 email (which I have lightly edited for spelling and grammar). “Also let’s not forget the AR15s, they were made full auto from the Lone Wolf gun store back in the 90s by a guy brought in by the FBI for me to put in place. Those guns went to bikers who were sell[ing] drugs on the border. Those drugs were [believed] to be coming in from China.”

In March 2013, Matthews corresponded with Jarrett, his former FBI handler, about this element of the PATCON operation. The name of the “guy” brought in by the FBI to broker the firearms deal was David Mann, who had a PO Box in St. Johns, Arizona. 

“I [would] pick him up in Payson, AZ on our way up to Surplus & Stuff in Snowflake … and met with a guy name[d] Tim,” Matthews recalled in a March 28, 2013 email to Jarrett. “He [would] show him his weapons that he was making and how he could make them anything they wanted. Then from there we took a trip up to where the guy [kept] the tractors that we were thinking the dope was coming in from.”

The tractors were apparently being used as part of an international narcotics smuggling operation.

During the trip described by Matthews, he and David Mann -- and perhaps the mysterious “Tim” -- met with another individual who “ran the church and we [thought was] selling the drugs to the bikers. We were going to get David to sell weapons too [sic] them. This trip was where [I] got David in with this [sic] guys so I could move on. Does this sound right to you[?] Also have more info on him and [meetings] at gun store (Lone Wolf) and other places like Scottsdale, before we turn[ed] him loose.” 

“Yes, that sounds absolutely correct about David,” Jarrett replied the following day. “I only introduced you to one guy that work[ed] with guns, and that was David.”

All of this is quite similar to the “Fast and Furious” operation, despite taking place decades earlier. 

At the time, as summarized in recent federal court filings, Matthews was employed by the FBI “to infiltrate and monitor the activities of the extreme political right.” As a Marine veteran of the Vietnam War, Matthews was eager to participate in what he was told was a mission vital to national security. He applied himself with earnestness, and was given a commendation by the Bureau for his efforts.

However, he eventually became disenchanted with PATCON, concluding that the FBI’s design “had been to infiltrate and to incite these fringe groups to violence,” rather than protecting the public. 

The proto-“Fast and Furious” operation to arm drug-dealing criminal gangs – an entirely typical specimen of prohibition-enabled official corruption – was one of several schemes that disabused Matthews of the idea that PATCON was a noble undertaking. In a meeting with Salt Lake City attorney Jesse Trentadue in July 2011 Matthews described “a PATCON operation designed to promote an extremist group to carry out a plan to damage the cooling system of the Brown’s Ferry Nuclear Power Plant in Alabama….”

More importantly, from Trentadue’s perspective, was Matthews’ account of seeing “Timothy McVeigh and a German National by the name of Andreas Strassmeir at a militia training facility near San Saba, Texas” shortly before the April 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing. 

“According to Matthews, he had reported the McVeigh-Strassmeir siting to the FBI, and was told by the FBI that the Bureau was already aware of that fact, which indicated to Mr. Matthews that others within the FBI were monitoring McVeigh on the run-up to the attack on the Murrah Building,” Trentandue pointed out in a motion filed before federal Judge Clark Waddoups last August. 

 

Seeking justice: Jesse in the 1990s...

For nearly twenty years, Trentadue has been trying to learn the full truth about the torture-murder of his younger brother Kenneth at the hands of the FBI. Shortly after the April 19, 1995 OKC bombing, Kenneth Trentadue – on parole following a prison term for bank robbery – was detained in San Diego and taken to the Federal Transfer Facility in Oklahoma City.

It was Kenneth’s singular misfortune to be a near-twin of another bank robber named Richard Lee Guthrie, who was already immured elsewhere in the imponderable depths of the federal prison system. Guthrie had been a member of a white supremacist gang called the Aryan Republican Army, which robbed banks in order to fund domestic terrorism – including the OKC bombing. The ARA frequented a white supremacist redoubt in Oklahoma called Elohim City, in the company of several federal undercover assets – among them the same Andres Strassmeir whom Matthews had seen in the company of Timothy McVeigh. 

The federal operatives who beat and garroted Kenneth Trentadue thought they were eliminating Guthrie, whose knowledge about the federal government’s role in OKC was potentially troublesome. The murderers arranged for Kenneth’s cell to be cleaned up and attempted to have his body cremated. Jesse and his mother Wilma intervened to preserve Kenneth’s remains, which displayed undeniable evidence that he had been beaten to death – and had put up a doomed fight against his murderers.

Shortly thereafter, Guthrie likewise died in a staged “suicide.” 

In 2001, a federal judge ruled that the FBI had lied about the circumstances of Kenneth Trentadue’s death and was guilty of destroying evidence in the case. Jesse set aside $250,000 of the $1.1 million civil judgment against the FBI as a reward for information leading to the prosecution of the murderers. That reward remains unclaimed. 

... Jesse preparing for trial last summer.

At this own expense, Jesse has continued his efforts to unearth suppressed video footage of the OKC bombing, which he believes will reveal the identity of one or more federal operatives who took part in that atrocity. Blessed with financial resources as inexhaustible as its institutional corruption, the FBI has used every tactic at its disposal – both legal and illegal – to prevent the disclosure of that video. 

In the service of that cover-up, the Bureau has repeatedly ignored and disobeyed orders from federal judges and engaged in blatant witness tampering.

Last July, Matthews was scheduled to testify – via teleconference – in a hearing before U.S. District Judge Clark Waddoups. Four days before his scheduled appearance, Matthews had a phone conversation with FBI Special Agent Adam Quirk in which the thoroughly intimidated witness promised that “I ain’t goin’ and I ain’t saying nothing unless somebody issues me a subpoena.” Even if the judge were to “haul my ass to Salt Lake City, I’m gonna set there on the stand and say I don’t recall anything.”

“That’s fine,” Quirk replied, approving of Matthews’ stated intention to perjure himself. During a phone conversation on the following day, Matthews repeated his assurance that he would try to avoid a subpoena.

“Well, yeah, and I mean – worst case scenario, even if you testified you can just – you can say you have, you know – you have nothing to say,” Quirk suggested.

Matthews floated the possibility that he might take a trip in order to avoid a subpoena.

“That’s fine,” Quirk replied. “F*ck ‘em, right?”

Last November 13, Trentadue filed a petition with Waddoups seeking to have the FBI held in contempt of court, and the appointment of a special master to oversee the FBI’s “compliance with the court’s orders, particularly relating to allegations of witness tampering, and with plaintiff’s FOIA request” for the OKC bombing videos. Waddoups acknowledged the validity of Trentadue’s claims – even as he declined to impose sanctions on the Bureau.

Matthews is residing outside Utah, beyond the range of a civil subpoena. Adam Quirk, who crimes in this case are now a matter of public record, was a potential source of trouble for the FBI – but that problem solved itself last December, when Quirk was arrested for aggravated assault after choking and beating his live-in girlfriend.

Quirk’s defense attorney says that Quirk has “made arrangements to move to Wisconsin,” which means that he will also be inaccessible by way of a civil subpoena. In response to my inquiry, FBI spokesman Todd Palmer said that “Adam Quirk resigned from the FBI in December 2014.”

Neither Matthews nor his PATCON handler, Donald Jarrett, has replied to repeated requests for comment. The March 2 inquiry regarding the Lone Wolf disclosures was directed to Associate Deputy Attorney General David Margolis, who for decades has acted as a “fixer”-without-portfolio for the Justice Department, abetting cover-ups, protecting hundreds of corrupt federal prosecutors, and otherwise obstructing accountability for official misconduct.

“I’m the department’s `cleaner,’” Margolis explained to an incoming Attorney General, according to a profile in the National Law Journal. “I clean up messes.”

During a career spanning a half-century and nine presidents, Margolis has tidied up the Regime’s bloody business from the Pine Ridge Reservation to Gitmo. He is precisely the kind of official who would see nothing unusual, let alone reprehensible, about federal agents providing machine guns to criminal gangs, or torturing a man to death in an Oklahoma prison cell in order to cover up federal complicity in domestic terrorism. 

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Underdogs and Overlords

We're not worthy: Georgia police dog "Tanja" is buried with full honors.

A little less than a year ago, Michael Vickers shot and seriously wounded a 10-year-old boy in Broxton, Georgia under circumstances that remain unclear. The victim, Dakota Corbitt, suffered serious and potentially permanent injury to his leg.

Despite the fact that this was an act of firearms-related violence involving a child, no charges were filed against Vickers. Although the public record is barren of a comment from Coffee County Sheriff Doyle Wooten expressing sympathy for Dakota and his mother, Amy, the sheriff pointedly commiserated with the shooter, telling a local NBC affiliate that Vickers is the father of three young children and that the shooting “is really preying on his mind.”

Many people bearing such burdens would make a point of meeting with the injured child and expressing contrition in person. Vickers didn't have time for such a gesture, however, because immediately after the shooting he went on what was described as a “pre-approved vacation” from his job as a drug investigator with the Broxton Police Department.

At the time of the shooting, Vickers was in pursuit of a man suspected of shooting a police officer from nearby Douglas, Georgia. However, Vickers didn't fire the shot at a human suspect; he was attempting to shoot the Corbitt family's dog. Owing to his good-enough-for-government-“work” marksmanship, Vickers nearly murdered the 10-year-old boy.

Every day in this country, police officers, acting on the basis of vague and usually implausible fears, shoot and kill dogs. This isn't true of service personnel whose occupations actually benefit the public -- such as postal carriers and private couriers – and involve frequent contact with unfamiliar canines. In some cases, the shooting or destruction of a family pet by a privileged aggressor has been compounded by the threat – or imposition – of charges against the grieving human victims.

The memory of man runs not to an occasion on which an armed emissary of the wealth-devouring class has been prosecuted for killing or injuring a privately owned canine. A member of the productive class who kills, wounds, taunts, or even barks at a K-9 “officer,” on the other hand, will face criminal charges, even if the act was committed in demonstrable self-defense. Under a bill approved by the Georgia state senate last week, a Mundane who “assaults” a police dog could face up to ten years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

...unless he was a fellow LEO, of course.

Senate Bill 72, “Tanja's Law,” is dedicated to the memory of a police dog that was shot and killed during a SWAT raid in Georgia that took place just a few weeks after Vickers nearly killed Dakota Corbitt. Tanja was buried with the Brezhnevite pageantry and state-dictated solemnity that accompany every police funeral.

Late last year, the man who shot Tanja, a genuinely unpleasant specimen named Steven Lee Waldemer, accepted a plea agreement imposing a 20-50 year prison sentence. This was seen as inadequate by Tanja's human comrades, who insisted that any Mundane who lifts an unhallowed hand to injure one of his canine overlords must suffer more severely than the present law dictates.

In its original draft, “Tanja's law” would have treated the killing of a police dog as an act of second-degree murder – the charge that would have been filed against Vickers if he had killed Dakota Corbitt and had done so as a common citizen, rather than a state-licensed purveyor of violence.

If enacted in its original form, “Tanja's Law” would have been the first statute in U.S. history – perhaps in the history of the Western World – to recognize the deliberate destruction of a non-human creature as “murder.”

Of course, this would have applied only to specially designated members of that species, whose codified status in law would have been superior to that of human beings who are not part of the exalted fraternity of official coercion. A dog killed by a police officer wouldn't be regarded as a murder victim, or autopsied by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, as “Tanja's Law” specifies. Nor would a human Mundane be allowed to use defensive violence to protect himself against an unwarranted K-9 attack.

Herein lies the unarticulated, but undeniable, evil of this bill: In its original form, it would have expanded the circumstances in which police would employ “justifiable” lethal force. Under the Graham v. Connor standard, the individual police officer is trained that lethal force is “reasonable” in response to a perceived threat to his life or that of a fellow officer. If killing a police dog is “murder,” a human officer on the scene would be legally justified in killing a Mundane who is “perceived” as posing such a threat.

Currently, it is common to see police officers gun down dogs that simply approach them. Indeed, that's how Dakota Corbitt was shot: The family dog raced into the family's front yard in response to the presence of an armed intruder. One entirely plausible scenario growing out of “Tanja's Law” version 1.0 would see a police officer gunning down a human being who verbally “threatens” or “takes an aggressive stance” when approached by a police dog.

The legislative purpose of the original bill was “to provide a measure of equivalency in the punishment of crimes committed against police dogs in the performance of their official duties as to that of peace officers [and to] provide that the offense of murder in the second degree shall include causing the death of a police dog while such police dog is engaged in its official duties....”

Although the revised legislation discarded the language designating destruction of a police dog (or horse) second-degree murder, it unambiguously elevates such animals above the rank of Mundane humanity.

It has been pointed out that any bill bearing an individual's name is likely pregnant with trouble. This is certainly true of “Tanja's Law,” as it is of most such legislation. As it happens, the current session of the Georgia State Legislature is considering two specimens of that type, the second of which –– House Bill 56, also known as “Bou-Bou's Law” – would actually legalize the use of no-knock SWAT raids in Georgia, where such raids are both quite common and entirely illegal.

“The current law already makes these kinds of raids illegal in Georgia,” observes criminal defense attorney Catherina Bernard, who contends that the bill would do “the opposite of what it says it’s going to do.”

Bou-Bou Phonesvanh, for whom the bill was named, is the toddler who was burned, maimed, and nearly murdered during a 2:00 no-knock raid carried out in Cornelia, Georgia last May 28 by Sturmabteilung in the employ of the Habserham County Sheriff's Office.

Bou-Bou and his parents were staying with relatives after their home in Wisconsin had burned down. Neither the mother nor the father was a suspect, or had a criminal record. The presence of toys and other indicia of children residing at the address should have been obvious even to the marginally sapient personages who find employment as police officers.

Heedless to any consideration apart from the degenerate urge to kick in doors and throw people to the ground, the Berserkers beat down the front door and hurled a flash-bang grenade into the crib in which the 19-month-old was sleeping.

The warrant authorizing the raid in which Bou-Bou's chest was ripped open and his nose was blown off was issued on the unsupported word of a police informant that a $50 drug transaction had occurred at the premises a few hours earlier.

An “official investigation” of the incident “justified” the use of force while Bou-Bou was still in intensive care. A prosecutor-dominated grand jury ratified that finding, while expressing highly qualified reservations about the use of no-knock warrants.

The panel described the investigation that led to the raid as “hurried, sloppy, and unfortunately not in accordance with the best practice and procedures.” However, it described the officers involved as “well-intentioned people … in too big a hurry.” The grand jury was actually more critical of “the parents and extended family” of the nearly-murdered child, who supposedly “had some degree of knowledge concerning family members involved in criminal activity that came in and out of the residence” – a claim that the state didn’t prove, but was sufficient to absolve the officers of all responsibility.

State Rep. Kevin Tanner has sponsored a separate bill that would supposedly place the most modest imaginable restrictions on the use of no-knock warrants – most significantly, by forbidding the use of such tactics between 10:00 PM and 6:00 a.m. That impediment could be overcome by an earnest declaration from police that a post-midnight paramilitary assault is necessary in order to preserve vulnerable evidence. Rep. Tanner, perhaps not surprisingly, was a sheriff's deputy in Dawson County, Georgia for 18 years, and has personally participated in no-knock raids.

Nothing in any of the proposed bills would actually prevent police from carrying out 3:00 no-knock raids. However, police unions will not countenance any criticism of such tactics.

“I don't think any changes are needed because it is not easy now [to get a no-knock warrant],” lied Carrie Mills, a representative of the International Brotherhood of Police Officers. Yes, she conceded, people – including permanently disfigured children – have been abused in post-midnight SWAT raids, but that's just how things are done in the Soyuz: “You have to draw the line between your right as a citizen to privacy and a community's right to live in a crime-free environment. You can't have them both.”

Although “Bou-Bou's” law has made it out of committee, legislative analysts describe the bill as “troubled” and unlikely to pass. This reflects the intense opposition from police unions and their allies, who prefer that such raids continue without legal authorization rather than seeing even the most trivial potential restrictions inscribed into law.

Such people believe it to be entirely appropriate to imprison a human being for wounding a police dog, while offering a paid vacation to a cop who shoots a ten-year-old boy, or blows open the chest of a sleeping infant with a flash-bang grenade. 

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