Emmanuel Goldstein's Dark Victory

In related news, Francisco Franco is still dead, too.

Whether Osama bin Laden departed the mortal realm for an unpleasant eternity years ago -- as sober and serious people have reported -- or last week in a firefight suitable for a sweeps week episode of NCIS, this much is certain: The government ruling us managed to turn that despicable creature into a prophet.

"I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed," bin Laden gloated shortly after 9-11. "The U.S. government will lead the American people, and the West in general, into an unbearable hell and a choking life." 

Osama's fondest wish was to see a civilizational conflict between the West and the Islamic world. A subsidiary desire was to see the United States spend itself into oblivion by carrying out that demented crusade. He doubtless was delighted to see the United States become mired in an intractable war in Afghanistan, and to see Washington expand the compass of its conflict with the Muslim world to include Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, and Somalia.

Bin Laden was almost certainly gleeful to witness the collapse of the most recent Fed-engineered financial bubble in 2008, and probably emitted a chuckle or two over the dollar's rapid disintegration. Assuming that CNN or Fox is available in hell, bin Laden will probably be permitted a fleeting moment of satisfaction when the United States descends into a hyperinflationary crisis worthy of Weimar Germany or contemporary Zimbabwe -- something that could occur before the end of this year. 

As a CIA-nurtured student of post-Leninist terrorist tactics, bin Laden understood the revolutionary formula outlined in Carlos Marighella's Mini-Manual for the Urban Guerrilla. 

The purpose of terrorism, explained Marighella, is to "to intensify repression," resulting in draconian measures that "make life unbearable" for the subject population. When faced with "revolutionary violence," government will eagerly resort to  "police roundups, house searches, arrests of innocent people [that] make life in the city unbearable.... " Rejecting the "so-called political solution," the urban guerrilla must become more aggressive and violent, resorting without letup to sabotage, terrorism, expropriations, assaults, kidnappings, and executions, heightening the disastrous situation in which the government must act...."

Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, who published and widely disseminated Marighella's terrorist tract, was a millionaire Marxist publishing magnate (yes, such people do exist). He concisely summarized Marighella's strategy as using relentless violence against the innocent in order to provoke an "authoritarian turn to the right" -- the imposition of dictatorial measures and the consolidation of power by a State that ere long will fall into the hands of the revolutionaries. 

Whatever else bin Laden was, he understood that dynamic and eagerly promoted it. Whether or not it was a product of conscious design, bin Laden and Washington's Power Elite existed in symbiosis. Every action taken by the government ruling us that abridged individual liberties and enlarged the public debt was a small victory for bin Laden's vision. The same is true of every CIA-conducted Predator drone strike that wiped out a helpless Muslim family, thereby sowing seeds of rancor that will blossom into anti-American terrorism.

Not a scene from a debt-ridden Third World nation. No, wait...

 Some people have long suspected that worms had gagged on bin Laden's mortal remains long ago, and that his name and likeness were being used in a "Weekend at Bernie's"-style hoax by our rulers. 

 Every once in a while the image of the omnipotent troglodyte -- who supposedly had the power to threaten our very existence while living in a cave somewhere in the Tora Bora Mountains -- would be resurrected to rally the public on behalf of the Long War. This routine succumbed to the law of diminishing returns about five years ago.


By now, however, the Regime no longer requires bin Laden's service as a hate figure. The purpose of such a totem is to personify an abstract "Enemy." Over the past two years, proponents of a civilizational conflict with the Muslim world have succeeded in convincing a large and growing segment of the population that Islam itself -- everywhere it exists, in whatever form it takes -- is the Enemy, and that coexistence isn't an option.

Although he would be on the opposing side of the proposition, bin Laden would appreciate the War Party's efforts to criminalize the practice of Islam in the United States. This is the objective of the "anti-Sharia" enactments that are sprouting like poisonous toadstools wherever the War Party and its acolytes have fertilized the ground with that malodorous substance in which such fungi thrive. 

Bin Laden would have admired the clarifying fanaticism behind the original version of Tennessee's proposed anti-Sharia ordinance, which would have treated peaceful belief in Sharia law as a felony punishable by up to twenty years in prison. He would be delighted to see the same U.S. government that is bombing, invading, and occupying Muslim nations abroad actively working to suppress the religious liberty of American Muslims at home. What better way to validate bin Laden's claim that war between Islam and the West is inevitable? 

Ten years ago, the image of the Enemy was that of an unabashedly hostile self-proclaimed sheik who reveled in his hatred for America. By now, much of the Right has been convinced that law-abiding American Muslims who conduct peaceful commerce and profess to love our country are the most insidious threat we face. 

When sectarian collectivism has metastasized into the marrow of our culture,  an apparition like bin Laden is no longer necessary. 


Assuming that the official narrative of bin Laden's death as a recent event is reliable, this development fulfills a promise made about a year ago by Attorney General Eric Holder, who told a congressional committee that bin Laden "will never appear in an American courtroom." Bin Laden was indicted for mass murder and other terrorism-related offenses (although, intriguingly, not the 9-11 atrocities), which means that it would have been entirely proper for him to be arraigned before a criminal court in an appropriate jurisdiction. 

The Regime has a deep bench: Al-Awlaki.

But that's not how things are done now by the Regime ruling us: The post-Bush doctrine of presidential war powers dictates that the incumbent dictator, as our "living Constitution," can order the summary execution of anyone on the planet for any reason he deems suitable. A corollary to that doctrine is that a "terrorist" is anyone thus designated by the Regime.

For a decade bin Laden was used to demonstrate the supposed necessity and wisdom of these totalitarian innovations. Anwar al-Awlaki, a "radical cleric" in Yemen who was clearly groomed as bin Laden's understudy for the past two years, will now assume the marquee role. 

Al-Awlaki -- who, like bin Laden, was cultivated by the National Security State before being designated an Official Enemy Of The People -- is a U.S. citizen targeted for assassination by a presidential order. This kind of thing was all but unimaginable ten years ago, but is now treated with torpid indifference by the people responsible for shaping public opinion. 


Thanks in no small measure to the ministrations of such people, much of the American public will be praising the government ruling us for sending Osama to hell, oblivious to the hell that the same government has stored up for the rest of us.




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Radicalizing the "Homeland"

They make a cute couple, huh? Terrorist fundraiser-turned-Homeland Security Commissar Pete King poses with an unidentified unlawful combatant.

 
"We're talking about a radicalization in this country that is linked to an overseas enemy," insists former IRA fundraiser and current head of the House Homeland Security Committee Pete King, in defense of his planned hearings into terrorist recruitment among American Muslims. A recent incident here in Idaho illustrates the connection King is talking about, albeit not in the way he intended.

Shortly before last Christmas, a resident of Twin Falls, Idaho was accosted by a stranger at a local Wal-Mart, who threatened to kill her. That threat was made credible by the fact that the snarling would-be assailant was armed and had killed people overseas during an armed conflict in the Middle East. 

The terrorized victim is a law-abiding American citizen whose only offense was to commit an act of peaceful commerce while wearing a head covering attesting to her Muslim faith. The aggressor, John C. Larsen, is a veteran of Washington's illegal war against Iraq. 

"My friends were killed by you!" Larsen reportedly screamed at the woman, who was accompanied by two small children. "I was blown up by you!" At some point in his tirade, Larsen also told the woman that she "didn't belong in the U.S." Leaving aside the fact that the target of his rancor was a U.S. citizen who had as much right to be here as he does, it apparently never occurred to Larsen that he and his gun-toting friends had no legitimate business being in Iraq.

Homegrown radical: Accused assailant John Larsen.

A 2006 National Intelligence Estimate acknowledged that the Iraq War increased the terrorist threat, rather than abating it. This is understandable, given the hatred and resentment that are the predictable by-products of a war of aggression against people who never harmed or threatened us in any way. 

People who are "blown up" by foreign invaders, and who see their friends and family slaughtered by them, often find themselves irresistibly tempted to kill others in retaliation -- at the price of their own lives, if necessary.

The episode in Twin Falls illustrates a  largely unrecognized form of potential "blowback" from the Regime's ongoing wars: The creation of a large population of traumatized combat veterans, some of whom are prone to criminal violence. Although at this point he has yet to be convicted of a criminal offense, Larsen was undeniably "radicalized" by his experience overseas, and it's difficult to describe his alleged actions as anything other than a form of terrorism -- albeit not of a kind Peter King would condescend to recognize.


The New York Daily News reports that King believes that American Muslims have a "misguided" belief "that they were victimized by a backlash of hatred after the Sept. 11 attacks," that the "hate they feel is imagined, and [that] Muslims need to put aside any fears they have towards official America and police." 


"I think a lot of that is a self-imposed fear they have, and that seemed to put them underground in a sense of non-cooperation," suggests King, who maintains that the purpose of his hearings is to entice reluctant Muslims to "cooperate."

"The Righteous rise with burning eyes, of hatred and ill-will; madmen fed on fear and lies -- to beat and burn and kill..."

 
A few weeks before King made those remarks, Muslims who assembled at a charity benefit in Yorba Linda, California experienced a remarkable group hallucination: Their imaginations, propelled by unreasonable, self-inflicted fear, conjured up a demented fantasy in which they had to walk through a vituperative mob that flung profane abuse at them and their children. 

 One feature common to this shared illusion was a speech by Villa Park Councilwoman Deborah Pauly, who boasted that she knows "quite a few Marines who would be happy to send these terrorists to an early meeting in paradise." Also playing a role in this common fever dream was Republican Congressman Ed Royce, who assailed the gathered Muslims -- not the mob, mind you, but the people quietly attending the charity event -- as "brutal, primitive, and barbaric," and expressed approval of King's impending hearings.


So strong was this entirely concocted persecution fantasy, in fact, that it somehow managed to impress itself on neutral recording media, leaving a video document of what certainly appears -- to those less perceptive than Rep. King, of course -- to be something perilously close to a pogrom.





This incident happened in Orange County, where a few years ago  the FBI targeted a local mosque for an infiltration/provocation op called "Operation Flex." The Bureau recruited a career criminal named Craig Monteilh, who (according to an affidavit he filed late last year) was instructed  "to advance an agenda that involved organizing terrorist activities, making reference to `jihad' (Holy War) and organizing terrorist plots and activities." Accordingly, under the pseudonym "Farouk," Monteilh hung around the mosque and tried to chat up anyone who would listen about the supposed merits of waging violent jihad. 

In the world as depicted by Pamela Geller and her ilk, "Farouk's" incitement to violence should have attracted an immediate and devoted following. Rather than attracting recruits, however, Monteilh repelled worshipers. Eventually, several members of the congregation were driven to obtain a restraining order to keep "Farouk" away from their house of worship. 

Two members of the mosque, alarmed over the possibility that an authentic radicalized Muslim was in their midst, approached Hussam Ayloush, director of the Southern California Chapter of the Committee on American Islamic Relations (CAIR). 


As everybody guided by Glenn Beck's prophetic wisdom knows, CAIR is no commonplace ethno-religious pressure group. As the infallible Frank Gaffney insists, CAIR is nothing less than the operational directorate for the North American Branch of the Global Jihad, and Ayloush -- covert Islamofascist that he is -- did the predictable thing: He called the FBI, with whom he had been cooperating since immediately following 9/11. J. Stephen Tidwell, assistant Director of the FBI's Los Angeles office, wasn't surprised to learn of "Farouk's" dealings, since he was the one cutting the provocateur's paychecks. 


This was precisely the kind of cooperation by Muslim religious and civic leaders that, according to King, doesn't exist. The FBI rewarded this patriotic action by framing one of the Muslims who had dropped a dime on their informant on entirely spurious charges (that were dropped last fall) in a transparent attempt to blackmail him into becoming a replacement asset. None of this was legitimate persecution, mind you -- merely the insubstantial musings of unreasonable minds freighted with entirely unfounded fears.

Murder victim Singh.

So potent are the unreasonable Muslim fears of persecution that they conjured into existence an entirely confected incident near Sacramento, California in which two elderly, turban-wearing men were gunned down, one of them fatally. Oh, but here's the technicality upon with King could triumphantly seize:  Neither of the victims, 67-year-old Surinder Singh, who was murdered, and 78-year-old Gurmej Atwal, were Sikhs, not Muslims, so this likely case of mistaken identity wouldn't count.

The same would be true of another incident in Sacramento last November in which 56-year-old Sikh immigrant Harhajan Singh, a cab driver, was beaten and robbed by tw young men who "shouted expletives and called him Osama bin Laden," presumably because Singh, like most Sikh men, wears a turban.

"He says, `I'll kill you,'" a brutalized Singh later told the press. "I say, `I'm not Muslim. Please." 

 Incidents of this kind are uncommon, but hardly unheard of. Four days after the 9/11 attacks, a Sikh immigrant named Balbir Singh Sodi was the victim of a fatal drive-by shooting at his Mesa, Arizona gas station. Frank Roque, who was convicted of murdering Sodi, took potshots at two other targets during his shooting spree -- a Lebanese-American clerk at a Mesa convenience store, and a local Afghan family.

Joliet, Illinois resident Kuldip Singh Nag wasn't shot. However, he was pepper-sprayed and severely beaten on the morning of March 11, 2007 by a police officer named Ben Grant, who materialized on his doorstep to announce that he was going to tow away a van that was sitting immobile in Nag's driveway because the vehicle had an expired license tag. 

When Nag objected to the impending auto theft, Grant attacked him, threw him to the ground, and beat him severely in front of his horrified wife and children while befouling the air with obscene -- and ignorant -- racial invective: "You f*****g Arab! You f*****g immigrant, go back to your country before I kill you!"

Nag, a Navy veteran who received the Bronze Star for his service in the first Gulf War, was already residing in his country. Granted, he had difficulty recognizing it after being severely beaten on his own property by an armed, tax-devouring bully -- and then being charged with "aggravated assault" for the supposed crime of trying to cover his head while Grant was repeatedly striking him with a baton. 


"I was just trying to cover up with my arms," Nag testified during his trial two years later. "He kept telling me `Go home' and `[expletive] Arab.' I'm not Muslim, but if I was, is that a crime in America?"


Well, in contemporary America -- as Nag discovered -- it is considered a form of "aggravated assault" to impede, in any way, the trajectory of a cranium-bound baton wielded by a foul-mouthed bigot in a government-issued costume. And for an increasing number of people whose bearings on reality are defined by the War Party's merry troupe of truth-twisters, it is not only a crime to be a Muslim, but even to resemble one. 

This variety of radicalization, which is likely to be a prelude to profound and pervasive ugliness as the economy continues to sicken, and the price tag of the Regime's overseas misadventures expands, is one Peter King is eager to abet.

Somehow, it just seems appropriate:

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About that "War on Cops"....

The War on the Streets: This is Miami, not Mogadishu.

What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive?.... The [Security] Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers ... and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!"--

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's famous jeremiad about the passivity of Soviet subjects in the face of the Regime's armed enforcement agencies. 

Every week — actually, every day — innocent people across the country are harassed, abused, brutalized, tortured, and murdered by armed strangers in government-issued costumes. Most of the assailants are never held accountable. Often, they are placed on paid vacation (commonly called “administrative leave”) while their colleagues devise an official rationalization for their crimes.

According to one very conservative estimate, at least thirty citizens are killed in police shootings every month, many of which occur during paramilitary raids conducted, Soviet-style, at daybreak or nighttime. Innocent people are frequently found among those killed, wounded, or brutalized in those raids; one recent example is 76-year-old New York resident Jose Colon, who was shot in the stomach by a SWAT operator who pulled the trigger trying to operate a flashlight on his tricked-out pistol.

The grim but statistically inescapable fact is that the average American is much more likely to be killed by a cop than by a terrorist. 

Those who publicize police abuses are routinely accused by apologists for government enforcement agencies of exaggerating the problem by focusing on a vanishingly small number of “exceptional” cases. When police are on the receiving end of criminal violence, however, those same apologists demand that we allow such exceptions to define the rule.


On the basis of recent trends, we can assume that two dozen or more Americans have been shot by police since January 1, 2011. In the same period, roughly half that many police have been shot, 11 of them either injured or killed during one unusually bloody twenty-four-hour period. This unconnected series of shootings has led many police officers to believe that they are targets in a “war on cops,” and that alarmist impression has been diligently propagated by police union officials who are always eager to exaggerate the very modest dangers of their profession.

“It’s not a fluke,” insists Richard Roberts, spokesman for the International Union of Police Associations. “There’s a perception among officers in the field that there’s a war on cops going on.” Craig W. Floyd of the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund described a "very troubling trend" of "officers ... being put at greater risk than ever before."

"I think it's a hundred times more likely today that an officer will be assaulted compared to twenty, thirty years ago," agreed J.B. Smith, Sheriff of Smith, County, Texas, in an interview with Tyler's NBC affiliate KETK. "It has become one of the most hazardous jobs in the United States, undoubtedly -- in the top five."

Actually, where the risk of death on the job is concerned, law enforcement doesn't crack the top ten list of most dangerous occupations, as designated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In fact, none of the jobs on that list involves people employed in the coercive sector.  Commercial fishermen, loggers, commercial pilots, farmers, and roofers all face a higher risk of work-related death than that confronted by the State's armed enforcers, for whom "officer safety" is job one.

Sheriff Smith, like others retailing the "war on cops" meme, recited the durable canard that police "work" is more dangerous today because they confront a more violent breed of street criminal. Five years ago, Joseph McNamara of Stanford's Hoover Institution, a former NYPD Deputy Inspector (and, unfortunately, an advocate of civilian disarmament), pointed out that police "work" may be safer now than ever before.

In 2005, McNamara noted, fifty-one officers died in the line of duty "out of some 700,000 to 800,000 American cops. That is far fewer than the police fatalities occurring when I patrolled New York’s highest crime precincts, when the total number of cops in the country was half that of today."

Yes, there is a war on the streets of America, McNamara allowed, but it is one waged by the cops, not on them:

"Simply put, the police culture in our country has changed. An emphasis on `officer safety' and paramilitary training pervades today’s policing, in contrast to the older culture, which held that cops didn’t shoot until they were about to be shot or stabbed. Police in large cities formerly carried revolvers holding six .38-caliber rounds. Nowadays, police carry semi-automatic pistols with 16 high-caliber rounds, shotguns and military assault rifles, weapons once relegated to SWAT teams facing extraordinary circumstances. Concern about such firepower in densely populated areas hitting innocent citizens has given way to an attitude that the police are fighting a war against drugs and crime and must be heavily armed."

 

 Government police agencies were always designed to control the public, rather than to "protect and serve" it. As sociologist David Bayley memorably put it, "The police are to the government as the edge is to the knife." Thanks in no small measure to the proliferation of independent media, the public is coming to understand that fact.

A large and growing segment of the public likewise has become palpably disgusted with the casual elitism of the armed tax-feeders among us, who see themselves as a caste apart from, and superior to, those from whom they extract their livelihood. The police unions and media organs that take dictation from them insist that the purported "war on cops" is being fueled by a growing public "disrespect" for the "authority" of police.

"The palm-sized shield worn on a police officer’s chest should be viewed as a badge of honor, not a bull’s-eye," sobbed the editorial collective of the Wilkes-Barre Times-Leader in a lachrymose house editorial that typifies media treatment of the supposed "war" on police. "Sadly, recent deadly shootings around the nation and alleged threats directed at Luzerne County law enforcers reveal a troubling lack of respect for officers’ authority and responsibilities, as well as their lives." 

 

The "threats" in question were allegedly made by 45-year-old Scanton resident Ray Mazzarella, who was arrested and charged with several counts of making "terroristic threats" for inflammatory comments he had posted about the local police chief on his Facebook page. Were the rational for Mazzarella's pre-emptive arrest applied consistently, scores or hundreds of police officers would have to be locked up and put on trial for equally inflammatory statements posted on chat boards frequented by LEOs. Of course, by even making that point I'm undermining public "respect" for police "authority" -- thereby, one supposes, abetting violence against our sanctified protectors.

Although Steve Groeninger, spokesman for the D.C.-based National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, admits that “we don’t have any data,” he told MSNBC that “there seems to be a type of criminal out there looking to thwart authority” (by which he means any directive issued by an armed government functionary) and warns that “cuts in police budgets could exacerbate the danger,” according to MSNBC.

This is an interesting variation on a familiar police union theme. As previously noted in this space, as municipal budgets shrink amid the ever-deepening depression, some police unions are literally trying to terrorize the public into supporting their budget demands. Oakland Police Chief Anthony Batts announced several months ago that because of budget cuts citizens shouldn’t expect police to respond to calls involving 44 kinds of crime, including burglary, grand theft, and other serious offenses. The hideously corrupt Camden, New Jersey Police Department adopted a similar policy after half the force was laid off. In Sacramento County, the Sheriff’s Office published an ad depicting what appeared to be a sexual assault on a child. “Don’t let them cut deputies and put your family at risk!” screamed the ad copy.

Reduced to its essence, the message here is this: Give us what we want, or people will get hurt. Those of us who oppose the demands of police unions can now expect to be told that we’re morally indistinguishable from cop-killers.

Every traffic stop, we are told, is pregnant with potentially lethal danger -- for the one party in that confrontation we know to be armed and invested with the supposed authority to kill another human being. In fact, encounters of this kind are freighted with peril for the member of the productive population who has come under the unwanted scrutiny of an armed emissary of the State. This is true of any interaction between the police and the private citizens on whom they subsist.

One likely product of the ongoing panic over a "war on cops" is the increased likelihood that police will resort to potentially lethal force in such routine encounters. After all, isn't it better to have the taxpayers absorb the cost of settling with the family of a murdered Mundane than to suffer the uniquely poignant anguish of burying one of the State's Anointed Ones?

Most of the potentially dangerous encounters between police and the public grow out of their roles as enforcers of drug prohibition and armed revenue collectors (those roles overlap, of course). Those dangers will grow more acute as the economy continues to sicken and people who have done no harm to others start to lose patience with the demands of the wealth-devouring class.

Rather than abating their demands and ratcheting down the conflict, however, those in charge of the State clearly intend to escalate it, making whatever use they deem necessary of all of the charming instruments of regimentation and mass violence originally developed for use overseas. One particularly unsettling illustration of this principle is the expanding domestic use of unmanned surveillance drones, which were originally developed for battlefield applications but will probably become as commonplace as SWAT teams within the next several years.

If they have it, they will use it; if it's been deployed by the military abroad, it will be employed by the paramilitary police at home; once it's been tested against criminal suspects, it will become part of the standard arsenal of social regimentation. At this point it appears that the only thing that will cause the machinery of repression to grind to a stop would be a fully realized economic collapse. Another grim possibility is that the State's relentless persecution of harmless people will grow so vicious that the "war on cops" being spoken of now becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy -- thereby creating a personnel shortage of the kind Solzhenitsyn described.



Anybody who takes the life of any human being through aggressive violence is a murderer and should be treated as such. That being said, this should be also: If the wildly exaggerated fear of being killed on the job results in increased attrition from the ranks of the State’s armed enforcers, one happy result will be a net decrease in the amount of criminal violence afflicting our society.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With Sinn Fein official Martin McGuiness, 2000.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Conscience of a Killer

Eric Strausbaugh of Franklin, Wisconsin, a 34-year-old husband and father, killed himself last October 31. Friends recall that he was experiencing marital difficulties and a great deal of job-related stress. A large part of his emotional burden was the result of his actions on November 9, 2004, when he was an accomplice in the murder of Michael Edward Bell.


Strausbaugh, an officer with the Kenosha Police Department, confronted Bell in front of his home at about 2:10 a.m. He has never provided an unambiguous legal rationale for the stop: He first claimed that Bell was speeding, then later asserted that he had run a stop sign. Neither of those claims was validated by the dash cam video from Strausbaugh's cruiser (which actually shows that Strausbaugh blew through a stop sign on the way to Bell's home). 


The video shows a visibly puzzled Bell emerging from his vehicle. Within seconds Strausbaugh is literally at the 21-year-old's throat, pushing him up against the vehicle then dragging him off-camera. A brief argument ensues, in which Bell can be heard exclaiming "I know my rights!" and Strausbaugh is heard demanding that the young man submit to a field sobriety test. Near the end of the five minute video clip we can hear Strausbaugh order Bell put his arms behind his back, followed by the unmistakable sound of a Taser being fired.

Three other Kenosha police officers -- who were reportedly within a few blocks of Bell's residence -- arrived on the scene a few minutes later. Strausbaugh insisted that he called for backup because Bell "ran," but there is no evidence to corroborate that claim. 

No more than seven minutes after the confrontation began, Bell was dead from a gunshot wound to the head. He was gunned down -- after being kicked and Tasered for several minutes -- in front of his horrified mother and sister. The actual killing was carried out by Officer Albert Gonzalez, who, in the clinical language of Dr. Douglas Kelly, former Chief Medical Examiner for Fond Du Lac County, "made [a] contact wound by pressing his gun against [Bell's] head at the time the shot was fired."


When Gonzalez pulled the trigger, Bell was being restrained by at least two other police officers. Strausbaugh maintained that Bell -- a much smaller man -- somehow managed to bulldog him up against a nearby car, and grab for his gun before being shot to death. Bell supposedly accomplished this feat despite being  Tasered multiple times, as well as enduring several punches and knee strikes to the ribs inflicted by Strausbaugh and Officer Erich Weidner (who arrived within minutes of the initial stop).

As depicted in a work of dramatic fiction the Kenosha Police Department wittily calls a "reenactment" of the homicide, Officer Gonzalez supposedly shot Bell in the right side of the head, despite the fact that this would have endangered Lt. David Krueger, who was standing directly behind the victim.




The most significant problem with this story is that "it is forensically impossible" for the shooting to occur as depicted in the Kenosha PD's little skit, according to Dr. Kelly. Gonzalez couldn't have shot Bell as portrayed  "without either [Bell's] neck being extremely hyper-extended or his body being bent backwards."

Not to worry: The Kenosha PD -- after offering the most solemn assurances regarding the scrupulous accuracy of its original story -- devised two different versions of the event in an attempt to demonstrate that it was possible for Gonzalez to have shot Bell on the right side of his head. This was done despite the fact that the initial witness statements, and the location of the shell casing following the shooting, made it clear that the gunshot was fired to the left side of the victim's skull.

This detail is critical: If he had been positioned to shoot Bell from the right, Gonzalez would have been able to verify that the victim had been attempting to grab Strausbaugh's gun. During the initial deposition in a civil suit filed by Bell's family, the officers involved in the killing all claimed that the shot was fired to the left side of Bell's head. Those accounts underwent a dramatic revision once the significance of that detail was made clear; suddenly they all ardently maintained that the gunshot had been fired from the right side. 

As the version of the killing performed by the Kenosha PD's Perjury Playhouse Theater Troupe demonstrates,  a killshot fired from the left would have placed Lt. Kreuger in the line of fire. Even if Kreuger had avoided being shot, his uniform wouldn't have escaped without being decorated by skull fragments and brain tissue. Yet this wasn't the case. Furthermore, although skull fragments were reportedly found on the scene, they were never provided to Dr. Kelly for forensic analysis.

Wherever Gonzalez was positioned when he shot and killed Michael Bell, this much is certain: The officer could not have seen the young man grab for Strausbaugh's gun, because he never did so. Tests run by the Wisconsin State Crime Lab found no fingerprint or DNA evidence indicating that Bell had ever touched Strausbaugh's gun or holster. 

Too short a season: Michael Bell, two months before his murder.

The "official" review by the Kenosha PD didn't deal with any of this evidence, which was exhumed through the efforts of the victim's father, retired Air Force Lt. Col. Michael Bell, Sr. The Department invested a total of two days before ratifying this killing as a "justified" use of lethal force.

Last March, on what would have been Michael's 27th birthday, the Kenosha City Government paid Bell's family $1.75 million to settle a federal civil rights lawsuit. In this settlement, unlike most others of its kind, there is no "confidentiality clause"; this permits Bell's family to use the money to pursue reforms intended to promote genuine accountability for police officers who use deadly force.


 "I'm not against law enforcement," Michael Bell, Sr. told Pro Libertate.  "I'm a retired career military officer who supervised military law enforcement personnel in my chain of command. I am on good terms with people in law enforcement here in Wisconsin, and always have been. But it's clearly improper for police to answer only to themselves when they kill someone -- particularly here in Wisconsin, where there apparently is no police accountability."

"Wisconsin is among the top five states in per-capita fatal police shootings," Bell points out. There were 23 fatal shootings by Wisconsin police, a more than 300 percent increase from the previous year. This isn't because the Badger State has a particularly large or aggressive criminal element -- at least where private sector criminals are concerned.

Seeking accountability: Michael Bell, Sr.

 Bell maintains that the "traffic stop" that ended with the death of his son was illegal, and conducted under highly suspicious circumstances. 


"Michael was scheduled to be in court later that morning to deal with the same cop who stopped him -- Officer Strausbaugh," Bell told me. "A few weeks earlier, Strausbaugh had been in a scuffle with Michael outside a local club, and he found a tiny amount of marijuana in Michael's car."

Michael's court date was the morning of November 9, and it's possible that he would have been facing some time in jail. So he "was probably spending a little time with his friends before facing what awaited him the next day," Bell continues. "But no drugs were found in his car after the shooting, and the lab tests showed that he hadn't taken any before the stop."


The test results did show that Michael had a blood alcohol content above the "legal" limit in Wisconsin; it was about the same as the BAC displayed by then-Wisconsin Attorney General Peg Lautenschlager, who was arrested the previous February after driving a state-owned vehicle into a ditch. Michael's BAC was lower than that of James L. Palmer II, the head of the police union (the Wisconsin Professional Police Association, or WPPA) when he was arrested for DUI in December 2009. Palmer, who was attempting to help another inebriated police union official who had plowed her car into a shed after missing a turn, was visibly intoxicated when State Police troopers arrived on the scene. 


Given the prominence of the brewing industry in Wisconsin, its state bird should be the lush. As someone who spent many nights performing on the state's bar and club circuit -- an interesting environment for a teetotaler -- I can testify that over-indulgence is commonplace.
When members of Wisconsin's tax-consuming class are found among the offenders, their acts are dismissed as "lapses in judgment"; however, when a mere Mundane like Michael Bell does likewise, it can literally be treated as a capital offense.

Michael Bell occasionally displayed the indiscipline and unruly appetites typical of men his age, but he was neither a criminal nor a troublemaker. Michael's original run-in with Stausbaugh represented the first trouble of that kind he had ever experienced. Why, then, was the officer lurking in Michael's neighborhood at 2:00 a.m., apparently eager to manufacture a reason to arrest him -- just hours before Michael was due in court?


Consider this: A first-time defendant who appears in court wearing a shirt and tie and smelling of decent cologne will make a far different impression on a judge than one who shows up in an orange jail jumpsuit and reeking of delousing spray. 

Bell is aware of at least one other case in Kenosha in which a man was stopped by police the night before a court appearance on a trivial infraction. Like Michael, the man in this second incident demanded to know why he had been stopped; the officer reportedly replied that his car had a "busted tail light" -- and then shattered one of the tail lights with his baton. The man was forced to undergo a spurious sobriety test, put in jail, and presented the next morning as a DUI suspect. Presenting a defendant in that light would be a very useful way of bolstering the court credibility of a police officer called to testify as the sole witness for the prosecution.


"I suspect that there has been a pattern here in Kenosha of police targeting people the night before a court case," Bell told Pro Libertate. "This would help explain why, in Michael's case, there were two police cars within a few blocks of his home, all of them facing the same direction, at 2:00 in the morning." 

It is incontestable that the Kenosha PD perpetrated a cover-up regarding the killing of Michael Bell. What was covered up, most likely, was an ambush disguised as a traffic stop that degenerated into an outright execution-style murder. 


"Because we didn't sign a confidentiality agreement as part of the settlement, we're free to publicize the details of Michael's case as a way of raising public awareness and promoting some badly overdue reforms," Bell points out. "We've put up a half-dozen large billboards featuring a large, smoking gun and the question: `When police kill, should they judge themselves?' We've also set up a website documenting the facts of this case, including much of the video evidence."


Bell also produced a brief, hard-hitting television commercial posing the same question, but found at least some local news outlets were reluctant to run the ad. This is typical of the treatment he's received from the political establishment and much of the media.


"I've approached local and state officials to urge them to change the process, but most of them are very timid about this," Bell noted to Pro Libertate. "There is a very large and powerful police union, and they have a lot of political clout. Nobody likes to be seen as`anti-police,' even to the extent of making them subject to the same laws that govern all of us. And the police union raises a lot of money; the WPPA runs one of the nation's most successful telemarketing fundraising operations." 


Some in the priesthood of state-sanctioned violence believe that Michael Bell, Sr. is morally responsible for Officer Strausbaugh's suicide.


Despite the fact that the shooting that claimed Michael Bell's life "was investigated and ruled justified," his "family was not to be consoled," complains Lt. Dan Marcou, a SWAT trainer and former police officer from La Crosse, Wisconsin who writes a column for PoliceOne.com. "They led a relentless campaign in the courts, in the legislature, on the Internet.... The campaign was negative, accusatory and Strausbaugh and the other officers involved found themselves under siege, for nearly six years."


Regurgitating one of the several discredited versions of the Michael Bell murder, Marcou descends into rank melodrama: 

"Officer Eric Strausbaugh struggled to hold onto his weapon on November 9, 2004, when his life was in the balance and he was rescued by the back-up officer who he called to the scene for assistance. In the early morning hours of October 31, 2010, Officer Eric Strausbaugh's life hung in the balance once again. This time he decided to not call for back-up. It is a struggle that he lost."


There is a genuine human tragedy in Eric Strausbaugh's self-inflicted death. In an act of authentic Christian compassion, Michael Bell, Sr. expressed sincere regret over the death of the individual who arranged the ambush that resulted in the murder of his son. But from Marcou's perspective, it is Bell who is an accomplice in Strausbaugh's death. 


"Don't let the bastards get you down," concludes Marcou, apparently applying that epithet to Bell and other Mundanes who refuse to accept their proper station in society. Theirs is the privilege to kill; ours is the duty to die. Why can't Michael Bell's father simply accept this arrangement, and shut up?


Assuming that Marcou is correct in concluding that Strausbaugh's suicide was an outgrowth of the killing of Michael Bell, the "bastards" at whom he should direct his indignation are members of his own tribe.

Displaying the colors: A "Thin Blue Line" window decal.

In April 2005, roughly six months after Michael Bell was killed and the two-day "investigation" that cleared the officers involved in that crime, the WPPA conferred a "Meritorious Award" on Strausbaugh, Weidner, and Gonzalez for "their bravery, unselfish teamwork, and outstanding use of their training" in carrying out the gangland-style slaying. The citation didn't even bother to mention Michael Bell by name, describing him as an uppity Mundane supposedly notorious for his "history of police resistance."


In addition to being placed on a pedestal by the local armed tax-feeder union, Strausbaugh and his cohorts were extolled as a model for police state-wide. As Marcou points out, "Among Wisconsin Law Enforcement Officers, the incident became a guide on how to respond when a suspect was attempting to disarm their partner." 


If Eric Strausbaugh -- despite what we might assume on account of his behavior on the morning of November 9, 2004 -- retained even the residue of a conscience, he would have known that he was an accomplice to murder and party to a criminal deception. Yet his professional peers -- people who purport to be the "Finest" in their respective communities -- treated him as a hero and treated his criminal acts as laudatory. His conscience would have demanded that he take responsibility for what he had done. However, his professional survival, however, required that he continue the charade. This is a formula for self-destruction.


Contrary to what we're told to believe, law enforcement is not a particularly dangerous occupation, at least when measured in terms of acts of violence directed at police officers. However, police are frequently a lethal danger to themselves: According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, each year "twice as many cops ... commit suicide as are killed in the line of duty." Significantly, another Kenosha police officer killed himself just weeks prior to Strausbaugh's suicide.


Former Maryland police officer Robert Douglas, executive director of the National P.O.L.I.C.E. Suicide Foundation, describes suicide as "the number one killer of law enforcement today. Accuracy is elusive in documenting the extent of the problem, because it is common to misrepresent suicides as "accidental discharges" or other lethal mishaps in order to avoid liability issues. 

What this means, of course, is that our system of "public safety" is built on a population of armed functionaries invested with the power of discretionary killing, many of whom are so emotionally unstable that they pose a potentially lethal threat even to themselves. 


Those who insist that the State's agents of official coercion must answer only to themselves aren't unduly troubled by the needless death of mere Mundanes. Given that they are all but inconsolable when one of their own meets an untimely end, they should contemplate this fact:  If Eric Strausbaugh had been compelled to take moral responsibility for his actions, he might be alive today. 

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