Heresies Against the Imperium

Pontifex Maximus

If Barack Obama is correct that white Americans are racist at a genetic level, shouldn’t this tendency be considered an inherent trait? Given the persistence of racism in the face of unremitting remedial action by government, should we regard it as an ineffaceable characteristic to be preserved and celebrated in the name of “diversity”?

Racism could be considered sinful. It is not innately criminal. Assuming that political government has a legitimate reason to exist, its jurisdiction applies only to “external behavior and not the inner life of man,” as Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote in a rare moment of moral lucidity. 

All people are sinners, but relatively few are criminals. Aspiring totalitarians demand the power to define what is sinful, to refine sins as crimes, and then to redeem society through the application of violence. The roster of contemporary sins has been expanded to include possession or display of the Confederate Battle Flag, which the murderous sociopath Dylann Roof conspicuously displayed in a photograph taken shortly before embarking on his killing rampage in Charleston.

Within days, the Battle Flag was removed from government-claimed property in several southern states. May the divine Lincoln forbid that property claimed by the plundering class be defaced by a symbol associated with aggressive contempt for the liberty and property of other human beings! It is entirely true that Confederate symbols should not be displayed on government property, but the appropriate remedy is not to ban the symbol, but rather to privatize the property. 

Racial bigotry can inspire vicious criminal acts, and when wedded to state power it is a murderous, monstrous evil. That was true of both the long-dead political entity called the Confederacy and the still-operating Regime that conquered the independent South. 

In the decade prior to the conflict conventionally called the Civil War, the federal government zealously protected the supposed property rights of slave “owners” throughout the union by way of the Fugitive Slave Act. 

 During that decade, southern slavery advocates were arch-unionists, and many abolitionists favored secession. The federal government was perfectly willing to use overwhelming force – including martial law – in order to capture escaped human beings and return them to captivity. 

In early 1854, a young man named Anthony Burns escaped from the clutches of a Virginia man named Charles Settle, who claimed to “own” him. Burns found a home and gainful employment in Boston, but an informant recognized him as an escaped slave and contacted the authorities. 

Deputy US Marshal James Batchelder, clothed in the majesty of the “law,” was deployed to Boston in pursuit of Burns. The marshal quickly located his victim and – after using the pretext of a bogus robbery investigation to place him under arrest -- locked him in the federal courthouse. 

News of this abduction provoked an immediate response from local abolitionists, who organized an armed posse to liberate Burns from his captors. In the ensuing skirmish, Batchelder was fatally shot, but the police retained custody of Burns. 

Desperate to avoid further bloodshed, Burns – a devout Christian – asked his supporters not to attempt another rescue. A few days later, he was led in shackles to a ship bound for Virginia. The rendition took place under the vigilant gaze of a 1,600-man military contingent sent by President Franklin Pierce to deter any further efforts to liberate Burns. 

 

All of this was done by the supposed authority of the United States Federal Government, years before South Carolina and other states exercised their constitutional prerogative of withdrawing from the union to protest insufficient federal zeal in enforcing the Fugitive Slave Law.

 In 1858, self-liberated slave John Price, who was living near Oberlin College in Ohio, was lured into a similar trap devised by a slave-catcher bearing the improbable name Shakespeare Boynton. The objective was to convey Price back across the Ohio River to the slave state of Kentucky.

Students and faculty at Oberlin College organized an effort to free Price, filing criminal complaints against his kidnapers and a habeas corpus petition with a local judge. Once peaceful and “legal” means had been exhausted, a group of thirty-seven activists formed a posse and liberated the captive by force.

During the trial of Simeon Bushnell, a timid bookstore clerk who drove the getaway wagon, the prosecutor piously accused Price’s benefactors of “outraging the law of the land,” which dictated that slaves were “not fit for freedom” and were the property of their owners whether found “north or south of the Ohio River.”

By this time, Price had been spirited away to freedom in Canada – because as a black human being he had no rights anywhere in the United States of America.

In his 1857 Dred Scott ruling, Chief Justice Roger Taney “decided that the power of Congress to make rules concerning the territory of the United States was subject to restrictions of the Constitution protecting property,” wrote historian Alice Nichols in her 1954 study Bleeding Kansas. “In a word, Taney ruled that slaves were property, not according to state law, but national…. Slavery had been given freedom of the public domain. Indeed, by inference, states themselves could no longer constitutionally exclude slavery. Since a man could safely take his slaves into states having anti-slavery legislation, it could be said there were no free states. Slaves were the same as any other kind of property, except that there were no laws requiring the return of strayed horses and cattle….[S]lavery had become a political football, kept inflated by Northern self-righteousness and kept in play by the South’s pigheaded championship of wrong.” 

Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law led abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison – borrowing the words of Isaiah -- to describe the constitutional union  as “a covenant with death and an agreement with hell.” 

For his part, Lincoln – like the corporatist cabal he represented – was determined to make the union “perpetual,” even if that meant perpetuating chattel slavery. Lincoln’s reaction to South Carolina’s rebellion was not, “What will happen to my brethren in bondage?” but rather, “What will become of my tariff?”

Lincoln favored the proposed Corwin Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would have made slavery a permanent institution. As a war measure he “un-emancipated” slaves who had been freed in Kentucky by General John C. Fremont. For every day of his presidency Lincoln dutifully enforced the Fugitive Slave law, using federal troops to reward loyal slaveholders by returning their escaped “property.” All of this reflects the fact that he wasn't interested in abolishing slave labor as long as his government could collect taxes on it.

Whatever one thinks of the cause for which they fought, Confederate troops carried the Battle Flag as they confronted a hostile army, generally in engagements that took place at a strict reserve from civilians. This was decidedly not the case of the Stars and Stripes.

 

At the Bear River monument near Preston, Idaho.

When Patrick Edward Connor and his troops massacred at least 300 innocent Bannock and Shoshone Indians – including scores of victims officially designated as “combatant children" -- at Bear River in January 1863, it wasn't a Confederate flag that caught the breeze above the slaughter. 

When John Chivington's troops annihilated hundreds of peaceful Cheyennes at Sand Creek in November 1864, the Battle Flag was nowhere in evidence. The troops who cut down unarmed women, and then mutilated the victims by hacking off their breasts and pudenda as trophies, carried out their noble labor beneath the Stars and Stripes.

After the South had been conquered, and Generals Sherman and Sheridan pursued what the former called the "Final Solution" to the Indian problem, they didn’t act on behalf of the Confederacy, nor did their subordinates fly its Battle Flag. The December 1890 slaughter at Wounded Knee, the American foreshadowing of Babi Yar, was committed by the vengeful remnants of the U.S. Army's Seventh Cavalry, who wrought that Nazi-grade atrocity beneath the Stars and Stripes. The same banner was proudly displayed by the troops who slaughtered tens or hundreds of thousands of independence-minded Filipinos after their islands were "liberated" from Spain.

 

Yeah, it's only a "massacre" when the Army loses.

Theodore Roosevelt, the first self-described Progressive in the White House, was a passionate believer in the innate superiority of what he called the “higher races” – the Anglo-Americans, of course, supplemented by others, such as the Japanese, whom he described as “honorary Aryans.” Roosevelt, obviously, was a militant centralizer who evinced not a particle of Confederate sympathy.

The “consolidation of the states into one vast republic, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of that ruin which has overwhelmed all those that have preceded it,” General Lee lamented in his correspondence with Lord Acton. The British statesman – who was no advocate or defender of slavery – agreed with that assessment: “I mourn for the stake which was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that which was saved at Waterloo.”

 

Moro Crater, the Philippines: It's not a "mass grave," it's a "Liberty Hole."

As a matter of policy, Barack Obama, the incumbent figurehead of the imperial ruling elite, compiles a larger body count before breakfast every day than Dylann Roof did in Charleston. 

Obama’s podcast interview with alleged comedian Marc Maron took place a few hours after Roof’s rampage – and two days after the weekly “Terror Tuesday” meeting in which he selects people for summary execution via drone strike. According to survivors of the Charleston atrocity, Roof very nearly shirked his self-assigned task of murdering innocent people at intimate range. A serial murderer who kills by remote control, Obama suffers from no similar scruples.

The discretionary power to dispossess or kill other human beings defines the office commonly called “Commander-in-Chief.” Dylann Roof was able to exercise similar power in the service of his evil ideas because the government ruling South Carolina, as part of its franchise within the U.S. government’s territorial monopoly on power, forbids worshipers to arm themselves to in self-defense. So naturally the prescription being urged upon us is for more aggressive measures to disarm the public while purging the country of the symbolic remnants of a short-lived attempt to break up Leviathan’s territorial monopoly, and any "retrograde" notions of asserting a right not to be ruled by Washington.

Prior to 1861, the united States were a decentralized confederation. As a result of the war, they were consolidated into a unitary government. After the Spanish-American War, this entity took on the characteristics of an empire -- or, to use the appropriate German term, a "reich." The Confederacy, for all of its manifold sins, never achieved that status.

The Confederate Battle Flag is reviled not because it is indelibly associated with racial bigotry and mass bloodshed, but because it symbolizes a refusal to be part of the sacred American reich.                                                          

                                                    
                                                    A quick update

I have previously described our family's housing situation. We received legal notice two days ago (June 24) that we will have to leave our present domicile no later than July 14. This was a reprieve, of sorts, but a highly qualified one.

With the help of many generous friends -- including one who has been nothing less than heroic and saintly -- it appears that we may be able to relocate by then. Our circumstances are still grim, but we deeply appreciate the help that so many of you have offered, and the kindness and concern you have expressed to us. Thank you so much -- and I will keep you apprised of future developments. 

Click here to download or listen to the most recent Freedom Zealot Podcast.
For updates, please follow me on Twitter.

Dum spiro, pugno!

Too Good for Government "Work": The Death of a Baton Rouge Peace Officer

Betty Smothers with her son, Warrick Dunn.

Every phone call that arrives after midnight is freighted with terrible expectations, and the one received by Warrick Dunn at about 12:30 a.m. on January 7, 1993 bore the worst possible news.

“You need to get to the hospital – quick,” directed the caller, a Baton Rouge police officer. By the time the 18-year-old Warrick arrived, his 36-year-old mother, Betty Smothers, had died from gunshot wounds received during an ambush at a nearby bank. Betty was killed in the line of duty as a private security guard for a Piggly Wiggly grocery store in an exceptionally crime-plagued section of the city.

A single mother of six young children and a corporal with the Baton Rouge Police Department, Smothers supplemented her income through an immeasurably more dangerous part-time job as a private peace officer. Baton Rouge at the time was experiencing a prolonged paroxysm of violent crime. As is always the case, city residents seeking protection for property had to pay for it themselves, with whatever they had left over after being taxed to pay for law enforcement “services.”

The night Smothers was murdered, she and store manager Kimen Lee discussed “the rash of grocery-store stickups in the area,” recalled a 1995 profile of Warrick, a much-lauded High School football and track star who became a national champion and Heisman contender at Florida State. “Lee remembers agreeing with Smothers that their nightly routine could easily make them sitting ducks.”

Smothers, who was permitted to use her patrol car while moonlighting, habitually entered the one-way drive-through from the “wrong” direction. This allowed Lee to unlock the night-deposit box through the passenger-side window and conduct her transaction in seconds. This also meant that Smothers would be partially shielding her client with her own body – as she was during the ambush that killed her. 

Lee was seriously wounded, but able to operate the vehicle from the passenger seat. She survived because Smothers, in keeping with her contract as a private security officer, placed the security of her client above her own, rather than making “officer safety” the chief consideration. Given what is known of her character, it is possible that Smothers would have behaved in a similar fashion while on duty, even though she had no legal obligation to do so.

By every available account, Smothers was a kind neighbor and a genuinely heroic mother who was fully invested in caring for her children. Unlike most of her professional colleagues, she was not “badge-heavy” during her 14 years on the police force, which prompted many who knew her to speculate that she had been transplanted from Mayberry. Among those she encountered during that career was a young miscreant named Kevan Brumfield, whom she caught shoplifting. Rather than handcuffing the thief and pressing charges, Smothers compelled him to return what he had stolen and urged him to take advantage of an opportunity most young men in his position wouldn’t receive.

Brumfield proved to be incorrigible. By the time of that encounter with Smothers, the teenager had lived in several group homes and been treated – most likely with the full suite of psycho-toxic drugs – for various emotional “disorders.” Owing in significant measure to the perverse economic incentives produced by prohibition, the intellectually stunted and morally obtuse teenager found a niche as a narcotics dealer and armed robber.

Although Smothers never spoke with Brumfield again, their paths intersected six years later on the day of her death: He was the one who fatally shot Sommers during the January 7, 1993 ambush.

Brumfield was convicted of first-degree murder and has spent two decades on death row. On June 18, the US Supreme Court granted his appeal for a review of that sentence in light of his claimed “intellectual disability” – a documented I.Q. of 75 and his history of psychiatric hospitalization. The Court’s ruling in Atkins v. Virginia, which was issued following Brumfield’s conviction, held that the execution of an “intellectually disabled” convict violates the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. 

In his dissenting opinion, Clarence Thomas observed that Brumfield’s claim “that his actions were the product of his disadvantaged background is striking in light of the conduct of … Smothers’ children following her murder.” Warrick, who had just celebrated his 18^th birthday, essentially became a surrogate father to his five younger siblings. Following a record-setting football career at Florida State and then with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the NFL, Warrick devoted himself to charity, establishing several organizations that provide for the needs of single mothers and traumatized children.

Betty Smothers’ funeral, which was held at the Centroplex Exhibition Hall, was attended by 2,000 people. The four-mile-long procession to the cemetery included hundreds of police cars. The Governor of Louisiana and Mayor of Baton Rouge spoke at Smothers’ wake, and a city street in Baton Rouge now bears her name.Friends and neighbors were eager to help Betty's mother raise her orphaned children. The death benefits provided to Betty as a 14-year employee of the department provided her children with material security of the kind rarely enjoyed by the spouses and children of private security operatives who are killed on the job.

Smothers died as a private peace officer defending property from aggression, rather than as a State functionary exercising the government’s monopoly on violence. The government law enforcement agency that employed Smothers sought to bask in the reflected glory of the heroism she displayed in a significantly more dangerous occupation. 

Bart Starr recognizes Warrick's charity work.

The early and mid-1990s were an unusually dangerous time for many Baton Rouge residents, but the police department that supposedly protected the public didn’t expose itself to those dangers. Betty Smothers was one of 74 Baton Rouge murder victims in 1993. In a single year, the “civilian” murder toll was more than four times greater than the number of police officers who have been killed in the entire history of the Baton Rouge PD.

Over the past 104 years, a total of eighteen Baton Rouge PD officers have died on duty. More than one quarter of them were killed in motorcycle or automobile accidents. Betty Smothers was the only member of the department to die through violence or an accident during a sixteen-year period -- 1988 to 2004. Her name is included in the roster of “fallen” Baton Rouge police officers despite the fact that she was not acting as a police officer when she was murdered.

As Nietzche famously said, everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has is stolen. In this case, the State’s coercive caste, seeking to add undeserved luster to its institutional image, has stolen the valor of a private peace officer.

Private security officers are made out of the same flawed material as the rest of humanity. Unlike government enforcement operatives, however, they can’t take refuge in “qualified immunity” when they harm innocent people, or allow them to come to harm through neglect or malice. Private peace officers confront much greater occupational risks than their government-employed counterparts. They are also dramatically less inclined toward violence than American police officers, who kill much more promiscuously than law enforcement officers in other countries.

Examining figures compiled by the Washington Post, the Guardian of London, and the watchdog organization Killed By Police, professor Edward Peter Stringham points out that “the police-against-citizen kill rate” in the U.S. “is more than 145 per 100,000.” The overall homicide rate, by way of contrast, is 5 per 100,000.

The two most violent countries in the world, he continues, are Venezuela and Honduras, where the national homicide rates are 54 and 90 per 100,000, respectively. Both of those countries are subject to State Department travel advisories.

“If you are not comfortable vacationing in those countries, it is little wonder why so many Americans are uncomfortable with police who kill at a rate more than 1.5 and 2.5 times the homicide rates” of those two extraordinarily violent countries, he notes.

Stringham, the Davis Professor for Economic Organizations and Innovation at Trinity College, is the author of Private Governance: Creating Order in Economic and Social Life, which he recently discussed in an interview with the indispensable Dr. Tom Woods. One of the key insights encoded in the title of that book is that governance does not require political government. One application of that principle is the private provision of security, a practice that exists because of the consummate failure of government police agencies to provide their advertised service.

Every monopoly offers an inferior product at higher cost than a competitive market would bear, and as Professor Stringham points out, this is emphatically true of government policing.

 

All but extinct: Chief Byard of S.F.'s Patrol Special Police.

In San Francisco at the time of Betty Smothers’ murder, the Patrol Special Police, a consortium of independent private security companies, “charged $25 to $30 an hour, depending on the particular service, while off-duty public officers charged up to $58 an hour of security service.”

“The need for private security is greatest for low-income families, since they are victimized by crime more often than other income groups,” Stringham observes in a paper co-written with Kai Jaeger. “All too often, regulations price low-income families out of the market for private protection…. Some cities only allow off-duty government police officers to patrol for private security firms, for example. Since hiring police officers costs two to four times as much as non-police private security guards, this type of regulation makes private security prohibitively expensive.”

Government intervention thus artificially prices private security beyond the reach of the people most desperately in need of that service. This is a very lucrative arrangement for police officers.

In San Francisco, write Stringham and Jaeger, roughly half of the police department “work off-duty, earning an extra $9.5 million.” That’s a sizeable and well-connected constituency seeking to insulate itself from purely private competition. The “Patrol Specials,” who are descended from patrols created in the 1840s to protect miners and merchants, are the only private security company allowed to operate in San Francisco under the city charter.

Predictably, that relationship corrupted the organization. Although it has continued to provide contract-based protection for property owners, it was also given a limited role in carrying out police functions, such as issuing citations and enforcing city regulations – and found itself on the receiving end of several lawsuits arising from abuses of the kind such behavior entails. Rather than expanding the use of private security patrols, the city administration has treated the Patrol Specials as the extinction-bound remnant of a less enlightened time.

“Despite all the good we do and how effective we are, the police union doesn’t want us around,” complained Patrol Special Police Chief Alan Byard in 2010. The unions have all but killed their competition: By 2014, fewer than 10 active Special Patrol officers remained.

Critics of private security companies frequently complain that “rent-a-cops” are insufficiently regulated and inadequately trained. Government police organizations are state-regulated, but – as we are constantly reminded – they are also entirely unaccountable to the public. The work quality of private security operatives is variable, but in a competitive market a contractor or company that is corrupt or inept won’t survive for very long. 

Furthermore, in some states – such as Arkansas and Louisiana – the professional standards of private security officers are much higher than those of government-employed law enforcement officers.

No training required in Louisiana for part-time cops.

In Louisiana, the state government requires security officers to receive a modest amount of classroom instruction regarding legal and ethical issues, use of non-lethal force, “limits of force,” emergency medical care “including First Aid and CPR,” and firearms training prior to being certified. They are then required to undergo an annual refresher course in “security training” and re-qualify with their firearms.

By way of contrast, a Louisiana resident can become a government-employed police officer without any training or certification whatsoever, and continue in that occupation on a part-time basis without ever attending a POST academy. Some police departments in small rural towns employ full-time officers who are entirely untrained – and, owing to “qualified immunity,” selectively exempt from the criminal laws that private security officers must obey.

The government-imposed distortions in Louisiana’s security market probably made moonlighting as a security guard economically irresistible to Betty Smothers, a single mother seeking to buy a home for her large family. Betty's day job as a cop notwithstanding, her conduct the night she was murdered suggests that she was probably too good for government “work."

Notes and asides  

A few weeks ago I mentioned that our family is facing eviction after our landlord walked away from the mortgage (this is the second time we've experienced this over the past six years). Our "hard deadline" to vacate is this Thursday (June 25). We haven't been able to find a new home here in Payette that is large enough for our family and within our severely limited budget -- a situation that isn't uncommon in the Idaho rental market.

We are planning a move to Homedale, a small town in Owyhee County, but our new home isn't yet available. Any financial support you can provide to help us with our moving expenses would be tremendously appreciated.Thank you so much.

Dum spiro, pugno!

Ain't That Amerika: Routine State Terrorism in the Imperial Capital

"Officer Safety" uber alles, you know.

The eleven-year-old girl shrieked in horror as the shower curtain was ripped away, leaving her exposed to the view of a large male stranger. Her sense of  violation was compounded by the threat of immediate, violent death: The marauder was wearing body armor and aiming an assault rifle at the naked, terrified child.

Downstairs, the offender's comrades were ransacking the house and barking profane orders at the traumatized child's family. Sterling Harrison, her 19-year-old brother, was sitting in front of a game console when three of the invaders burst into his upstairs room, bound him, and shoved him down the stairway. Her terrified siblings – one thirteen years of age, the other seven – were corralled and imprisoned at gunpoint in the living room along with the rest of the family.

The invaders were police, of course. Nobody in the home was suspected of committing a criminal offense. No evidence of criminal misconduct was found. The SWAT raid was carried out after 10:00 PM, in violation of municipal ordinances. The rationale for this act of state terrorism was the drug-related arrest, nearly two weeks earlier, of Mordsen Box, the 11-year-old girl's estranged father, who hadn't resided at the address for several months.

This after-dark military raid took place at a residence located less than three miles from the White House.

Thirteen days before the raid, Mr. Box was arrested by Metro D.C. Police after five ounces of marijuana were found following a pretext traffic stop. Officer Taylor Volpe, who conducted the stop, claimed – falsely, according to the family’s lawsuit against the MPD – that the rear license plate of Box's car was partially obstructed by a plastic cover.

Once the stop was underway, Volpe – in keeping with his indoctrination as an opportunistic road pirate – asked if there was “anything illegal” in the vehicle. Like countless others in similar situations, Box made the tragic mistake of answering a question the officer had no right to ask. He stated that he wasn't “aware” of anything illegal in his car, and that Volpe could carry out the search “if you have to.”

“OK, so I can look?” Volpe reiterated, inducing the intimidated driver to make his consent explicit. Within seconds the officer had found the marijuana, which was confiscated along with $180 in cash that was found in Box's wallet. His expired driver's license listed 1054 Quebec Place NW as his home address.

Both Mr. Box and his domestic situation were well-known to the local police. During the weeks leading up to the April 18, 2013 raid, police had paid two visits to the home while searching for Box. On both occasions family members explained that Box didn't live at the address.

Those facts were carefully omitted by Volpe in the search warrant application filed after the traffic stop. Among the falsehoods included in Volpe's affidavit was the claim that a “utility listing” was found for Volpe at that address. In fact, all of the utilities were listed in the name of Shandalyn Harrison, Box's ex-girlfriend.

Invoking his “experience,” “knowledge,” and “training,” Volpe insisted that a search of the residence was justified by the supposed likelihood that a large quantity of narcotics and drug proceeds would be found at the residence.  For too many judges, the rote recitation of such claims will obviate the need for actual evidence.

“In many dozens of other warrant applications sworn by MPD officers to different Superior Court judges in the one-year period, MPD officers similarly claimed under oath, based on the same `training' and `experience,' that a broad category of people referred to as `drug traffickers' attempt to hide the evidence of their criminal activities in other places that are not their own home,” notes the lawsuit filed on behalf of Harrison and her children. “These statements of `training' and `experience' thus purportedly give agents of the District's government the ability to raid and search multiple homes and other locations for every traffic stop or street arrest in which they find contraband.”

At the time he filled out his warrant application, Taylor Volpe was a rookie officer with the MPD. He was assimilated into the department’s institutional culture very quickly.

In July 2013, just weeks after the home invasion that grew out of Volpe’s affidavit, the officer was given a “Rookie of the Year” award by the 5^th District Citizen’s Advisory Council of the MPD. Those to whom that award is given “are acknowledged … by cops who know good police work when they see it (and work alongside it),” observed the Council. Given their standards of behavior, Volpe and his comrades would be suitable for employment in some of the worst Third World despotisms. In fact, they might be a bit over-qualified.

Saddam Hussein famously said that “Law consists of two lines above my signature.” For the DC Metro Police, and the pathologically indifferent judges who enable them, “Probable Cause” consists of whatever speculative, unsubstantiated claims an officer makes, as long as they are prefaced with a reference to his “experience and training.” The result is an enforcement regime in which police in the nation's Capital behave in a manner indistinguishable from U.S. soldiers carrying out raids against the families of “suspected militants” in occupied Baghdad.

Sexual humiliation of captives during a judicially authorized home invasion appears to be a standard element of the ritual.

About three weeks before Ms. Harrison's 11-year-old daughter was dragged naked from the shower by an armored, masked assailant, Michael Pitts was thrown to the floor of his home by SWAT operators who tore off his pants and “probed his naked genitals and anal cavity” in front of his disabled mother. The 37-year old Pitts was in the kitchen cooking for his bedridden mother when the Berserkers kicked open the front door.

The rationale for this home invasion was the arrest, three days earlier in a different location, of Pitts' uncle Tyrone, who had been detained on the streets without probable cause by officers who demanded that the 64-year-old man submit to a body search. The pedestrian, who was not suspected of committing a violent crime, was arrested after the officers found a gun.

In the subsequent search warrant affidavit, Officer Mark Pugh listed not a single “particularized fact suggesting that guns, ammunition, or other contraband would be present in the Pitts' home,” the family pointed out in its lawsuit against the MPD. It provided only “generic and conclusory claims that, based on their `training' and `experience,' [police] are likely to find guns, ammunition, and other firearms accessories in a person's home after an arrest for gun possession is made away from the home.”

Neither firearms, ammunition, nor evidence of criminal wrongdoing were found during the raid – and as Michael Pitts can testify, the search was nothing if not thorough. Neither Officer Pugh nor his comrades bothered to explain how a body cavity search could produce evidence of a weapons-related offense. Presumably, their “training and experience” authorize them to inflict pointless humiliation of that kind, and their “qualified immunity” protects them against civil and criminal liability for such actions.

Ella Lane, a 71-year-old woman whose home was raided in October 2012, endured a different variety of sadistic abuse. The elderly woman, who had been watching television when her door was broken down by the SWAT team, was dragged to her front lawn and held, at gunpoint, in view of her neighbors for six hours while occupation troops ransacked the home in which she had lived for 37 years. During that time she was not allowed to eat, drink, or use the restroom.

Once again, the invaders failed to find any evidence of criminal activity. As they left the shattered home, one of the Stormtroopers told Lane that if he were ever called back to the house, he would “make sure that she lost her home,” recounts a lawsuit filed against the department.

As in the case of Tyrone Pitts and his family, this SWAT raid grew out of a warrantless search in which a gun was discovered. The subject of the earlier arrest – a 28-year-old man named Terrence Crossland – was the victim's grandson. Crossland and two friends were smoking on the sidewalk when they were accosted by officers from an MPD Vice unit. Crossland was arrested for violating the District’s open container law after one of the officers found a gun in a jacket belonging to one of his friends.

It was on this basis that Officer John Wright swore out a formulaic and perjurious affidavit claiming that because of his “training and experience” he just knew that “persons involved in illegal activities maintain books, records, documentation and other papers relating to the ordering, sales, and servicing of their firearms.” He didn’t even bother pretending that Crossland’s friend lived in Lane’s house; he simply used the only address he could find. 

Karakatsanis (l.) with fellow civil liberties litigator Phil Telfeyin

Attorney Alec Karakatsanis, who filed the civil complaint on Lane's behalf, correctly observes that “it was not and is not illegal to possess a firearm at one's home in the District. Nowhere did [Officer] Wright allege … that the residents of the home did not possess valid licenses or that they had been disqualified from lawful firearms ownership.” 

Nor did he establish a basis for treating Mrs. Lane as a suspect in a crime: Her only involvement in this matter consisted of living in a home near the scene of the arrest.

As Karakatsanis points out, Wright's warrant application “sought permission for what amounted to a Colonial Era general warrant, requesting that `a Search Warrant be issued for the entire premises … for any other evidence of a crime that may be found.'”

General warrants of the kind routinely used by Washington's Metro PD figured very prominently in the angry letter sent to London by Jefferson and his colleagues explaining the moral basis for the use of lethal defensive force against colonial-era law enforcement officers.

That comparison is unfair, given that colonial-era Redcoats tended to be more restrained than contemporary American police officers, and they were also more liable to punishment for any abuses they committed. A more appropriate comparison would be to the behavior and methods employed by the Regime's occupation forces overseas.

The MPD's warrant applications adapt the “pattern of life analysis” used in counterinsurgency operations – both Special Forces raids and drone strikes. “Probable cause” isn't necessary to authorize such measures. All that is required to unleash the strike teams or dispatch the drones is for analysts to establish connections of some kind – kinship, known association, a single cell phone conversation or text message – between a potential target and a “suspected militant.” In the fashion of the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy, anybody who is killed or injured in the operation is classified as either a “militant” or an associate of one. 

The execution of Miriam Carey.

Unlike the residents of Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Area, people living in D.C.’s majority-black neighborhoods aren’t terrorized by the Empire’s robotic heralds of mass destruction. They are merely haunted by the knowledge that police can invade their home without cause, strip-search them in front of their families, or drag their naked, screaming grade school-age daughters out of the shower – and then threaten them with the loss of their home if they pay a return visit.

The three incidents described above, which are typical of the estimated 80-124 SWAT raids that occur every day in the American Soyuz, took place within a ten-mile radius of the White House. Two of those raids, interestingly, were carried out a few months before Miriam Carey was executed in the streets of Washington, D.C. after inadvertently driving through a traffic barricade near the White House.  

No other country endures routine state terrorism of this variety.  Perhaps we should consider this one facet of “American Exceptionalism.”

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Dum spiro, pugno!