"We're Fighting A War": Civilian Disarmament and the Martial Law Mindset

Bonfire of the liberties: Chinese police incinerate "illegal" guns.

Denver resident Shawn Miller is accused of several acts of criminal violence. On one occasion, he and an associate beat a pedestrian, leaving the man with a broken knee and a permanent physical disability. In a second assault, Miller and another buddy beat a disabled Iraq war veteran so severely --using both fists and clubs -- that he briefly "flat-lined" as EMTs treated him.


The facts in those cases are not disputed, yet Miller has not been charged with a crime. However, he is being sued by Jason Anthony Graber, one of his victims. In light of Miller's documented history of criminal violence, the plaintiff's attorney has demanded that the assailant not be permitted to bring a firearm while being deposed.

Miller protests that this is an unconscionable act of "oppression." With the aid of the Denver City Attorney, Miller -- an Officer with the Denver Police Department -- has filed a petition with the U.S. District Court seeking a "protective order" allowing him to be armed during the depositions.

The Department's Operation Manual requires that officers be "armed at all times" -- a provision that poses some interesting challenges for officers who choose to bathe, assuming that there are any who do. "Requiring a uniformed or non-uniformed police officer to disarm when he is compelled to give a deposition at an attorney's office, or at any other unsecured location, presents a significant officer safety issue," whines an affidavit provided by Lt. Dikran Kushdilian of the Denver PD.

Attorney David Lane, who is representing Graber, quite sensibly insists that some precautions must be taken in deposing people who are "defendants because they have acted illegally and violently toward others in the past."

The Denver Police Department has a well-earned reputation for brutality and corruption, and Lane has deposed more than a few abusive cops, and those proceedings "can get very contentious. When I'm cross-examining cops about their misconduct, past and present, they get angry, and I don't wish to depose angry people who have a long history of violent behavior while they're wearing a gun strapped to their waist."

Lane demands that the deposition take place in a setting in which neither side is armed. Denver's municipal government demands that the examination should take place at the federal Courthouse, where Miller and other officers in similar cases "would surrender their weapons to the custody of the U.S. Marshall [sic], and would be unarmed during the deposition."

In other words, it's not quite the case that Denver officers have to be "armed at all times"; the critical issue is the preservation of the government's monopoly on the "legitimate" use of force in all circumstances. Lane should counter Denver's demand by offering to permit Miller to carry his firearm to the deposition, while specifying that he and his associates would also be armed. The official response to that counter-proposal would be instructive.

Leading lambs to the slaughter: "Toy Gun Bash."

While Lane most likely wouldn't choose that approach, he is sensible enough to recognize that the State's agents of armed coercion are the most dangerous element in society, and prudent enough to act on that understanding.


Owing to the tireless efforts of the organs of official indoctrination, a large portion of the public assumes that the opposite is true, and as a result can be easily convinced that only those commissioned to commit violence on behalf of government can be entrusted with the means to do so.

A splendid example of this deadly agitprop is offered by the "Toy Gun Bash," which was first inflicted on Providence, Rhode Island seven years ago by the criminal clique running the municipal government.

Each year around Christmastime, children living in Providence are compelled to line up and feed their toy guns into the maw of the “Bash-O-Matic,” a device described by the Boston Globe as “a large, black, foam creature with churning metal teeth and the shape of a cockroach spliced with a frog.” In exchange for feeding their toy guns into this recombinant monstrosity, each child is given a substitute toy that is deemed to be suitably "non-violent." They are also forced to endure a harangue regarding "the dangers of playing with guns, real or fake."

Maintaining the monopoly: Burning confiscated guns.

 The Providence event, continues the Globe, is "a version of the gun buyback program in which adults trade firearms for gift certificates.”

In fact, gun “buyback” programs are a form of what Dr. Edward J. Laurance of the UN’s Register of Conventional Arms calls “micro-disarmament” — or, more to the point, civilian disarmament.

The expression “buyback” assumes that government has a monopoly on the use of force, and that only duly authorized agents of officially sanctioned violence should be permitted to own guns and other weapons — and thus the State is taking back from Mundanes a privilege to which they’re not entitled.

Gun “buyback” and turn-in programs are a common feature of military occupations, both here and abroad. U.S. military personnel in Haiti, Somalia, the Balkans, Iraq, and Afghanistan have employed that tactic (as David Kramer notes, this helps the occupiers to acquire a useful hoard of “drop guns” that can be used to frame innocent people  as “terrorists” or “insurgents"). The same approach was used to disarm American Indians as they were cattle-penned on reservations.

Over the past decade, UN-aligned activists in several countries have staged events in which guns confiscated from civilians have been destroyed, a ritual sometimes called the “Bonfire of the Liberties.” This is in keeping with UN-promoted dogma (expressed most forcefully in its 2000 agitprop film Armed to the Teeth) that the only “legal” weapons are those “used by armies and police forces to protect us,” and that civilian ownership of firearms is “illegitimate.”

The UN’s campaign for civilian disarmament -- which, just like matters of national disarmament, is assigned to the world body's Office for Disarmament Affairs -- was inaugurated in 2000 as part of the “human security” agenda promoted by then-UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. In late 1993 and early 1994, Annan -- who at the time was head of the world body’s “peacekeeping” operations -- presided over the disarmament, and subsequent annihilation, of roughly 1.1 million Rwandans.

Annan was actually an accessory before the fact to that genocide: Informed in early 1994 of the impending slaughter by Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian officer commanding UN peacekeeping troops, Annan ordered Dallaire to pass along his intelligence to the same government that was planning the massacre.

Dallaire, who had been ordered to disarm the future victims, was ordered not to raid the government arms caches that were later used to carry out the murder rampage.

Most of the killing was carried out by machete-wielding mobs acting as government subcontractors. But it would have been impossible to butcher hundreds of thousands of armed people, nor would the mobs have been able to round up and annihilate the targeted population without the active support provided by the regime’s armies and police forces — you know, the armed agents of state violence who were there to “protect” those who were hacked to pieces.

Children should learn what happened in places like Germany, Cambodia, and Rwanda (as well as places like Sand Creek and Wounded Knee) when people willingly surrendered their guns to their rulers — but a government school classroom is no place for lessons of that kind.

One of the cases used to promote the Toy Gun Bash in Providence actually underscores the reliably fatal consequences of a government monopoly on force. The Globe points out that as children were herded toward the Bash-O-Matic, they were told the cautionary tale “of a 14-year-old boy who police nearly shot after they confused his air pistol with a real gun.” For rational people, this incident illustrates the compelling need to disarm the police, rather than swipe toys from innocent children.

The same schools that use DARE programs to recruit children into the Pavlik Morozov Brigade consistently force psychotropic drugs on children who display unfortunate symptoms of non-conformity. This principle applies to the issue of firearms: In the name of “Zero Tolerance,” children are routinely punished for such supposed offenses as bringing toy “weapons” to school (including -- I am not making this up -- candy canes), improvising them from school supplies, or even drawing pictures of guns, yet they are routinely encouraged to write letters to members of the imperial military who are “serving our country”  by killing people who have done us no harm.


Those who insist that religion has no place in the government-run school system aren’t paying attention: The entire purpose of “public” education is to catechize youngsters in the worship of the Divine State. Rituals like Providence’s Toy Gun Bash serve a sacramental function; they are the equivalent of a child’s first communion in the government-sponsored church of collectivist self-destruction.

 While the little lambs are taught to be docile, submissive sheeple, the Regime is honing the lupine instincts of those supposedly tasked to protect them.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal recently described how recruits at the Metropolitan Police Department Academy are indoctrinated into perceiving the world as a 360 degree battlefield, where they are perpetually under siege and should be prepared to employ lethal force without hesitation.

"When you put that badge on, there are people who want to kill you," intoned Officer Wil Germonsen, who -- like a large and growing number of local police officers, has a military background.

The Review-Journal plays an extended riff on the familiar, fatuous, and entirely false assumption that law enforcement is a spectacularly dangerous occupation:

"After some time on the street, the recruits will never see the world the same way. They'll always be on guard -- carrying a gun on duty and off, checking out fellow shoppers at the grocery store, thinking about those worst-case scenarios while having dinner with the family. It's like a switch that flips on and never turns off...."

"I believe every single recruit here, when they put that badge on, they are warriors," insists Germonsen. "We're fighting a war."

What this means, of course, is that the state-created armed tribe to which Germonsen belongs is an army of occupation -- primed to kill, given broad discretion in the use of lethal force, and trained to consider all of us who don't belong to their tribe as potentially lethal enemies. Some way had better be found -- and pretty damned soon -- to de-fang those wolves in sheepdog disguise.  Meanwhile, it would be wise to do what we can to avoid placing ourselves at a potentially fatal disadvantage when dealing with those who belong to the Brotherhood of Sanctified Violence.

                                                     UPDATE: Bringing the War Home

"Many law enforcement officers called up to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan are finding it difficult to readjust to their jobs once home, bringing back heightened survival instincts that may make them quicker to use force and showing less patience toward the people they serve," reports the AP. 

A report compiled last year by the International Association of Chiefs of Police and the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Assistance "warns that the blurring of the line between combat and confrontations with criminal suspects at home may result in `inappropriate decisions and actions — particularly in the use of ... force. This similarity ... could result in injury or death to an innocent civilian.'"

The Imperial Military makes increasing use of Guardsmen and Reservists whose "civilian" job is domestic law enforcement, and domestic police agencies increasingly recruit from the ranks of combat veterans. As noted above, police recruits are being trained to consider themselves "warriors" on a battlefield, rather than peace officers. We really should dispense with the illusion that contemporary law enforcement is anything other than the domestic branch of a seamlessly integrated military apparatus. (h/t The Agitator.)

                                   Second Update: Seattle as a Battlefront

Courtesy of commenter QB we see the following video of 27-year-old Seattle Police Officer Ian Birk gunning down John T. Williams, an artisan who was carrying a carving knife and a block of wood. No more than four seconds pass between Birk's demand (it wasn't a lawful order, because Williams was threatening no one) that he drop the knife, and the first of several gunshots fired by the officer. The entire encounter lasted roughly eight seconds.

Williams had a troubled past, but was not known to be violent. He had some emotional problems and, most importantly, was functionally deaf -- which meant that he couldn't hear the demand that he drop his knife -- which was closed when photographed by crime scene investigators, despite Birk's claim that it was open at the time of the shooting.

A peace officer in this situation would have taken at least a little more time to resolve the situation without drawing his gun, let alone discharging it. But, as we've seen on numerous occasions, contemporary law enforcement officers are on a war footing, which means that their default setting is "overkill."

It's worth noting that one of the officers who responded to Birk's "shots fired" report tells him that he did the "right thing" -- even though the official review subsequently ruled that the shooting wasn't justified.

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Speak No Ill of the County Dictator

Early in a dictatorial reign that left millions dead, Indonesian dictator Suharto enacted a series of laws punishing public dissent as "criminal defamation" of state officials. Those laws, which remain in force today, are frequently used to punish activists who publicize police abuses. Similar laws have been used to similar effect in Singapore, Mexico, and even in Canada. That list has now expanded to include Montana's Lake County Sheriff's Office.

On September 30, Sheriff's deputies raided the Bigfork home of Terry Leonard, an outspoken critic of the department who maintains a website called www.asksheriffluckylarson.com. The officers seized computers -- including an iPad belonging to Leonard's wife, and a personal computer belonging to his 7-year-old son -- as well as printed e-mails, electronic storage media, and anything else they could find that might be related to the website. 

Deputy-turned-critic: Leonard.

Lake County Attorney Mitch Young has refused to comment on the reasons for the seizure, beyond offering the predictable and perfunctory observation that the matter is an "ongoing investigation."

Prior to the raid Leonard was already the subject of an election practices complaint filed by LannyVanMeter, treasurer of the Jay Doyle for Sheriff campaign and a Detention Officer at the County Jail. (Jay Doyle is currently Undersheriff to incumbent Sheriff "Lucky" Larson, who is not seeking re-election). That led to the search, which may result in a charge of "criminal defamation" against Leonard.

Sheriff Lucky Larson

"Lake County has sent a clear message," Leonard told the local press. "The message that they're sending is don't question us, don't accuse us of wrongdoing, don't even look at us sideways. Or, we will come take your stuff, and try to make you be quiet."

Leonard is both an outspoken critic and a veteran of the Lake County Sheriff's Office. Earlier this year he was fired by the department for "failing his probation" as a full-time deputy. The reasons for the termination were not specified. 

 

"I was an officer for seven years, six of them in the reserve force," Leonard told Pro Libertate. "This is a huge county -- we're in Montana, which is a huge state -- and we often had just a few officers to cover this vast territory. There is a real disparity between regular officers and reservists, in terms of what they're permitted to know and the level of access they have. So it wasn't until I was hired to be a full-time officer that I discovered how bad things have become."

As Leonard describes it, becoming a full-time deputy in the Lake County Sheriff's Office was a bit like becoming a "made man" in a crime syndicate.

"I'd be sitting around with members of my team and my sergeant, and they'd be telling me things that I'd have to call a litany of criminal behavior," Leonard recalls. "Some of it involved violations of department policy, or petty acts of everyday corruption. But more than a few were actual crimes," such as allegations of poaching by department personnel, which are currently under investigation.

How they see themselves: Detail of an SRT t-shirt.

Of particular concern to Leonard was that he described as the pervasive attitude that the "badge lets [law enforcement officers] to do whatever they want. They think it's OK to bully citizens and other officers. They think it's OK to take ammo from the ammo locker for their personal use without permission, even though the taxpayers paid for it.... They think the badge on their uniform means they don't have to answer to anybody."


Many of Leonard's most serious allegations focus on the Lake County Special Response Team (SRT), a SWAT-style paramilitary unit.

Last March 19, Leonard alleges, an SRT exercise involving an Army-issue M-117 roadside explosive nearly cost the life of a local woman, who literally stumbled on the device while out walking her dog. "Jay Doyle's SRT team left the device unattended and unwatched," he complains.

Leonard's website also offers photographs of a commemorative t-shirt distributed to SRT officers by a team member who was re-deploying to Iraq. The black t-shirts contain a movie-style "advisory" warning that "Use of this team may result in broken doors, windows, heads; along with the risk of live fire injuries and possible death. When using this product please use extreme caution: Strong violence/gore and some language may occur."


Those t-shirts -- which bear more than a passing resemblance to commemorative garb issued by other police departments -- were not the only tangible illustration that the SRT viewed itself as part of an army of occupation.


"Right now the ATF is investigating a case involving an unregistered machine gun that was used by one of the deputies as a duty weapon," Leonard pointed out to Pro Libertate. "The base weapon was an AR-15 owned by the department" -- which, of course, had been provided to the Sheriff's Office through a Pentagon program. "This deputy -- who claimed to be an ex-Marine, and told all kinds of bogus combat stories -- purchased an auto-sear kit and converted it to full-auto," Leonard continues. "All he had to do was register the weapon, but he refused to do so this. Like others on the force he believed that the rules didn't apply to him, because of his badge. He had this same SRT kick-in-your-door mindset. `I'm a cop -- I can do whatever I want.'"

The accumulating evidence of institutionalized corruption in the Sheriff's Office "created something of a moral conundrum for me," Leonard recalls. "I liked my job, of course, but more importantly I have a wife and two kids and a house to pay for. But I couldn't just ignore what was going on."

"Look, I don't claim to be the most moral individual I know," Leonard concedes. "I'm an old Navy man, and I've been arrested before, with good reason. I've made my share of mistakes, been in my share of scuffles, and I'm not particularly proud of it. As I've gotten more mature, I've learned to hold myself to a higher standard, and not let testosterone dictate my response to situations. So when I left for work every morning I would literally look at myself in the mirror and remind myself to use my head, do what is right, and make good decisions."

One decision Leonard made was to complain about the casual corruption he encountered, which meant that "within a couple of weeks I had been fired."

A week after being expelled from the force, Leonard -- whose "hands were no longer tied" -- created his website. It was ignored for about eight months "until last week," he observed just a few days after the raid. The same County Attorney who signed the complaint that led to the raid, Leonard relates, "signed one of the many letters of recommendation that led to the decision to hire me in the first place."


The raid "was a simple bullying and intimidation tactic," Leonard observes. He remains on friendly terms with active-duty deputies who agree that the department is in need of an ethical overhaul.  "Four other deputies traveled with me to Helena and testified to the POST [Police Officers Standards and Training] Council regarding the problems in the Sheriff's Office," he points out. When contacted by Pro Libertate on October 6, Leonard was on his way to meet with a current deputy who was providing a signed affidavit for an anticipated lawsuit arising from the September 30 raid. 

"Whatever happens in the election on November 2, we're still going to be pressing for accountability," Leonard maintains. "If the department and the County want to go to court, that's fine with me; I'd love to be able to depose those people under penalty of perjury. The citizens of Lake County demand the truth about what's going on in their Sheriff''s Office."

Ironically, this is true not only of Lake County, Montana, but also of Lake County, California.

A campaign pitting incumbent Lake County Sheriff Rod Mitchell against Deputy Frank Rivero has churned to the surface detailed allegations of internal strife and malfeasance similar to those Leonard found in Lake County, Montana. 

Rivero, a 10-year veteran LEO who joined the Lake County, California Sheriff's Office in 2007, has accused Mitchell of running a department rife with "mismanagement, cronyism and racial discrimination," notes one local press account. 

Whatever the merits of the racial profiling charge, the public record is replete with evidence that the department is a festering puddle of corruption. Five deputies have been cashiered over the past year, including one charged with stealing from the department's armory, one accused of conducting illicit surveillance, and another who used money from a federal marijuana eradication grant to take helicopter flight lessons.


The most serious scandal to emerge from the 200-member department involves former Chief Sheriff Deputy Perdock, who killed 51-year-old Lynn Thornton in an April 29, 2006 boating accident at nearby Clear Lake. Perdock had been operating his 385-horsepower, 24-foot powerboat at speeds in excess of up to 60 MPH on the gloomy, moonless night when it struck the stern quarter of the sailboat containing Thornton and her companion, Bismarck Dinius.

"I'm a victim": Former Chief Deputy Perdock

"There goes some idiot who is going to kill himself or someone else," grumbled an onshore observer -- a retired police officer -- just seconds before that prophecy was fulfilled. The "idiot" in question, however, was part of Lake County's protected punitive caste. His victims enjoyed no similar immunity.

Dinius, who was at the tiller of the sailboat at the time of the accident, was prosecuted for causing the death of Thornton and a felony charge of boating under the influence of alcohol.He was acquitted on all charges following a trial in which the defense utterly annihilated the prosecution's case. Perdock, Sheriff Mitchell's second in command, was never charged; he was kept on the payroll for a year on paid vacation (aka "administrative leave") before being dismissed from the force. 





"I see myself as a victim," simpered Perdock in a pre-trial interview with the Lake County DA, who at the time was preparing to prosecute the actual victim, Bismarck Dinius.

In a "notice of claim" filed in anticipation of a wrongful prosecution suit against Lake County, Dinius charges that Sheriff Mitchell, working with "numerous LCSO officials" and Lake County District Attorney John Hopkins, "concealed, manipulated, and/or suppressed material inculpatory evidence" against Perdock. This accusation is buttressed by an account offered by one of the deputies who played a central role in the case.




Former Deputy James Breland, who investigated the fatal accident, was ordered by his superiors not to administer a preliminary alcohol screening to Perdock at the scene. In a court deposition Breland later testified that he expressed his concerns over this order to a deputy district attorney prior to Dinius's trial. Rather than investigating Breland's complaint, the prosecutor attempted to suborn perjury from the deputy by instructing him "to use words to describe the `order' as a `discussion' ... when testifying at the preliminary hearing of Bismarck Dinius."


Unfortunately, Breland did as he was told, only to find that this gesture of tribal loyalty was inadequate. Within days he found himself "subject to a continuing barrage of investigations for acts which Sergeant Breland did not do or for acts which everyone else does but are [for which they] are not disciplined," he attests. In retaliation for expressing his misgivings to the deputy DA, Breland's reputation was destroyed and he was eventually fired.

According to Breland's deposition, the department maintains "a system of discipline where favored officers are given mild treatment for extraordinary offenses" -- a form of "patronage discipline" in which the internal affairs process is used "to attack the credibility of deputies who fail to adhere to the unwritten code of conduct of the Sheriff's Department."


In his deposition, Breland lists two dozen cases in which deputies involved in criminal behavior or serious misconduct "were disciplined lightly or not at all." 

The cases include several potentially fatal episodes in which a firearm was improperly discharged; one instance in which a deputy "aimed his duty revolver at another deputy while in a highly intoxicated state"; a physical assault on a female deputy by a male colleague; a SWAT team member responding to a call while intoxicated; a deputy who "used his taser in an off-duty incident involving alcohol"; and several allegations of sexual misconduct, including one involving a minor.



Whether or not Frank Rivero is more ethical than Sheriff Mitchell and his claque, Rivero performed a significant service to Lake County by mounting a campaign against the incumbent, who had previously run unopposed. 

After Rivero peeled away the LSCO's facade of probity, Mitchell retaliated against the whistleblower by following the precise formula Breland described: Rivero suddenly became the target of an Internal Affairs probe alleging sexual assault against a woman who was arrested in December 2008. 


The sexual assault charge against Rivero appears to be devoid of merit. The timing certainly seems to validate Breland's charge that the LCSO uses Internal Affairs investigations to retaliate against officers who speak ill of the county dictator -- the same "offense," in a different guise, that may lead to the spurious prosecution of Terry Leonard in another Lake County nearly 1,200 miles away.


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Martial Law: A License to Loot, a Permit to Plunder (Updated)

Breaking and entering: Where does this fit under the heading "To protect and serve"? A paramilitary "strike team" commits a felonious break-in of a home in the flood-ravaged Midwest.


Digging up the planted axioms that litter our ordinary conversations can be a revealing exercise. We learn how deeply rooted our supposedly free society has become in collectivist and militarist assumptions.

For example: How often do we hear or read language that draws a distinction between "police" and "civilians"?

Our republican framework of government supposedly prohibits the use of the military in domestic law enforcement. Yet if a police officer isn't a civilian, he of necessity must be considered some variety of soldier: He bears arms, belongs to a force organized in a military hierarchy, issues orders, and expects immediate obedience to his demands.


Police are supposedly civilian "peace officers," distinguished from the rest of the citizenry (to paraphrase Robert Peel) only by the fact that they are specially charged to protect the rights and property of the innocent as a permanent assignment, rather than an occasional necessity.


Yet when non-professional police officers are given "law enforcement" duties by local governments -- as in Gilbert, Arizona, where such people are part of a unit that can issue traffic citations and investigate accidents -- they are referred to as "civilian auxiliaries" of police departments. Again we see the critical distinction: The regular police are something other than civilians.


Roughly a year ago, USA Today reported that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had created a shortage of ammunition, leaving police and "civilians" at the back of the line. Annual police awards ceremonies across the country routinely honor not only law enforcement officers but "civilians" for various distinguished acts.


Cultivating a new crop of "law enforcement" officers: Teenagers participating in a summer police training program receive instructions from SWAT operators at a firing range.



And, significantly, it is very common for "civilians" to be charged with "disobeying an officer" even when no other alleged offense is involved. That charge makes little sense unless it is assumed not only that police exercise authority akin to military personnel, but that common civilians are at the bottom of the hierarchy. Were this actually a country in which governments and their enforcement agencies derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, wouldn't it be possible to charge a police officer with "disobeying a citizen"?


As I mentioned above, these assumptions are usually buried and carefully ignored. But they are rudely exposed whenever crisis descends on a community and the familiar pretenses are blown away. Catastrophic natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina or this year's Midwestern floods are eagerly embraced by law enforcement agencies as a pretext for overtly exercising the kind of power that many of them covertly lust to employ all the time -- the power to regiment their communities at gunpoint under a form of martial law.


Think, once again, of the roots of that expression: "Martial" has its origin in the proper name Mars, referring to the pagan deity of -- what activity?


The term unmistakably refers to a military posture, or a state of war. It is the suspension of normal life via force majeure, resulting in rule by unalloyed force. And the capacity for rule of this kind is embedded in every law enforcement body in every community across the country, simply waiting for an excuse to manifest itself.


Many who reside in our flood-ravaged Midwest are learning, as residents of New Orleans did before them, that our paramilitary "protectors" will eagerly exploit disasters in ways that compound the suffering inflicted by a natural disaster. Many citizens in such circumstances prefer to stay in their homes, running their own risks in order to protect what is theirs. But it is
standard operating procedure for police -- aided, at times, by National Guardsmen -- to force such people out of their homes, and to use the force of arms to prevent those who have left from returning.


In the wake of the floodwaters in Iowa came all of the impedimentia of military occupation -- armed guards, checkpoints, detention areas. These strictures were imposed on communities already reeling from a deadly caprice of nature. Rather than permitting people to inspect their own property, "strike teams" that included armed police broke into locked homes, including the occasional occupied dwelling.


One Cedar Rapids homeowner, understandably outraged that a "strike team" had broken into his otherwise undamaged home, confronted them and made his feelings known in forceful but measured terms. This prompted police officer Josh Bell to threaten the homeowner with arrest for "harassing" the "strike team."


The business end of government "compassion": Armed "protectors" arrest Cedar Rapids homeowner Ricky Blazek at gunpoint (left, below).


That aggravated homeowner was relatively fortunate.


Fellow Cedar Rapids resident Ricky Blazek, one of several thousand flood victims reasonably infuriated by "checkpoints" preventing them from returning to their homes, tried to circumnavigate one such roadblock in his automobile. This resulted in Blazek being forced out of his car at gunpoint and arrested.


While the armed "strike teams" had unfettered access to homes of flood victims, and the media was given limited access in order to chronicle the supposed heroism of the government functionaries, homeowners basted in a seething broth of frustrated suspicion.


After all, would any thinking person feel secure knowing that government agents, freed by a natural disaster from the constraints of the pesky Fourth Amendment, had free rein to break into their homes and help themselves to anything they found therein?


Last year, the small town of Greensburg, Kansas was all but obliterated by a tornado of a ferocity not seen in the region since Dorothy Gale's house was rapted away to Oz and deposited rudely on top of Hillary Clinton's long-forgotten sister.


That's certainly more than enough for any town to suffer. However, the police establishment, displaying government's infallible gift for compounding tragedy, made matters immeasurably worse by barring residents from their homes and then selectively looting them for firearms (and, in some cases, jewelry and other valuables).

Gun Week reports that these thefts were made possible because officers "from various agencies" -- local and state police, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, FEMA, and the ATF -- "allegedly claimed that martial law had been imposed when it had not, and ordered all residents to leave the town."


Those residents who discovered the thefts and demanded the return of their firearms found them, in many cases, damaged to the point of being useless. A few opened gun cases only to discover that their firearms had been replaced with guns of inferior quality.


Bob Martin, an 83-year-old trap shooter, returned to his home the morning after the tornado to discover that several of his guns were missing. Like Ricky Blazek, Martin was originally barred access to his home by officers who claimed, falsely, that martial law had been declared by the municipal or state government. He was forced to take a circuitous route to his home; by the time he got there, his gun safe had been plundered.


After getting back several -- but not all -- of his guns (which had been damaged in police custody, Martin, along with his wife, moved out of Greensburg. He now regrets not shooting his way through the police barricade that kept him from defending his home and property.


"If I'd have known [that the martial law claim was a ruse, and the police were looting his gun collection], I had a gun of my own in the car, and I'd [have] loaded it and gone in," Martin says. "Ain't nobody going to keep me off my property."


Whatever it is that prompts a man in his ninth decade to take such a commendably militant stance toward the looters in blue, I earnestly hope it's contagious.


Provoked by the police crime wave that descended on tornado-ravaged Greenburg, the Kansas state legislature this year enacted HB 2280 (.pdf), a law that (per the official summary) "prohibits officials, during a declared state of emergency, from forcibly dispossessing an owner of any firearm not otherwise prohibited by law, or from requiring registration of firearms not required to be registered under state law."


Now, that bill was pockmarked with troubling qualifications (for instance, no peaceful and law-abiding citizen can properly be "prohibited by law" from owning any weapon he has the means to purchase and the skill to operate, "laws" holding otherwise notwithstanding). But the fundamental point here is of the "Well, duh" variety: Police shouldn't take advantage of natural disasters to steal firearms from citizens, any more than street crooks should capitalize on the opportunity to swipe consumer electronics from undefended retail stores.


Thus it is hugely significant that HB 2280, which only prohibits police from doing something they weren't authorized to do in the first place, was opposed by the Pratt County (Kansas) Sheriff, the Kansas Association of Chiefs of Police, and the Kansas Bureau of Investigation.


From their point of view, it's just not worth the trouble of having a natural disaster if the event can't be exploited to regiment local civilians and confiscate their firearms.


UPDATE: Submit or die....


Justin Raimondo of AntiWar.com offers the following capsule summary of the unpunished massacre of dozens of Iraqi civilians by a U.S. Marine unit in Haditha:


"When an IED killed one of his Marines, [SSgt. Frank] Wuterich and company shot everyone in the vicinity – including five unarmed men who were getting out of a taxi. Wuterich claims that the Iraqis disobeyed orders to stop and raise their hands over their heads, but others on the scene testify that they were complying and were shot anyway. Yet, whatever happened, Wuterich's working assumption – that the five harbored hostile intent toward him and his men – was and is undoubtedly correct. Because that's what imperialism is all about: occupying countries where you're hated by the locals, who are constantly trying to kill you. So naturally you get nervous and trigger-happy, and mistakes are made. That's the sort of war we're fighting and have to fight as long as we're in Iraq." (Emphasis added.)


Here we see how Iraqis living under an undisguised military occupation are expected -- on pain of summary execution -- to obey the orders of a foreign soldier. A variant of that mindset can be seen anytime an American citizen is arrested and charged with the supposed offense of "disobeying an officer's orders." And during periods of emergency rule, whether or not the condition is referred to as "martial law," those referred to as "civilians" in post-Katrina America can expect that they'll be treated with just a little bit more solicitude than Iraqis -- but not much.


Martial law, after all, is merely a military occupation conducted within our borders, rather than outside them.


And we should entertain no illusions about the fact that police agencies are deliberately re-tooling themselves into overtly military bodies. This can be clearly seen in -- among other things -- recruitment pitches like this one (courtesy of Radley Balko) from a SWAT team in Rome, Georgia.







Available now!












Dum spiro, pugno!

The State on Steroids

Steroid-enhanced uber-villain Bane.

Seeking to fine-tune the utopia of peace, plenty, and progress that is the United States of America under the reign of Bush the Dumber, the Drug Enforcement Administration recently carried out what the State stenographers in the prestige press call the “largest crackdown in American history on illegal steroids.”

“Operation Raw Deal” was not merely multi-jurisdictional, but multi-national in scope: Agents from the DEA and the Food and Drug Administration executed 143 search warrants, arrested 124 people, shut down 56 domestic steroid labs, and collaborated with counterparts in nine foreign countries. And since this was a “drug war” initiative, officially sanctioned theft was part of the program as Feds “forfeited” 25 automobiles, three boats, 71 firearms, and $6.5 million in cash.

All of this was done to protect the public against ... well, against what, exactly?

Steroid abuse (there are clinically appropriate uses for steroids) is perhaps the ideal specimen of a malum prohibitum – something that is a “crime” only because the State has so decreed. Born of vanity and hopelessly skewed priorities, steroid abuse is among the stupidest of the myriad varieties of self-inflicted damage practiced by flawed and fallen human beings. But the key here is that it is self-inflicted -- and the State has no legitimate jurisdiction (except in one case I'll get to anon) to forbid or punish steroid abuse.

Like most in his line of work, the late professional "wrestler" Chris Benoit -- who killed his wife and disabled son in a murder-suicide earlier this year -- used steroids. But his lethal breakdown may have had more to do with prescription anti-depressants than illicit testosterone boosters.

I grant that the use of steroids and other performance enhancers has tainted professional sports, and that the resulting accomplishments should be considered fraudulent. But the Feds – you know, the charming folks who relentlessly debase the currency and compel us to use it under threat of official violence -- have neither the constitutional mandate nor the moral standing to punish athletes who undermine the competitive integrity of their chosen sports.

(Incredibly, one announced reason for the steroid crack-down was to suppress steroid use in anticipation of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.)

“Roid rage” -- a condition characterized by sudden, explosive bouts of abnormal aggression -- does appear to be a legitimate problem, albeit one that has been defined largely through anecdote, rather than clinical studies. It's difficult to see how that state of mind is inherently worse than alcohol-induced intoxication and the resulting impairments. This suggests to me that however widespread the problems associated with unsupervised individual steroid use might be, they're nowhere near as serious as the much more common problems associated with our society's most commonly used mood-altering drug, alcohol.

There is at least one serious steroid-related problem that government should address, and most likely will not: The growing use of steroids by police officers.

Falling Off the Thin Blue Line, a recently self-published memoir by former Texas police officer “David Johnson” (the name is a pseudonym), describes the author's “addiction” to steroids, his side-line career as a steroid dealer, and his impressions about the extent of steroid use among the State's armed enforcement agents. (I'm sure I'll have more to say about “Johnson's” book in the future.)

This is not a recent development. The FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin reported in 1989: “Anabolic steroid use by police officers is a serious problem that merits greater awareness by departments across the country.” This assessment came a year after Congress banned the “unauthorized” possession and use of steroids by the public.

According to former police officer and longtime police psychologist Gene Sanders, “There is sort of an underground, unspoken tradition among several departments that I've worked with that if you really want to bulk up, this [steroid use] is the best way to do it.... The thinking is that big is better than small, tough is better than weak.” Implicit in that “thinking,” of course, is that a police officer should be a physically intimidating presence.

I'd bet platinum to potato chips these guys were juiced.

Joe Occhipinti, executive director of the National Police Defense Foundation and a highly decorated former street officer, insists that “Any officers saying they need to take steroids to perform their jobs, I don't buy it. If you need to subdue a guy, and he's 6'2” and 300 pounds, you request backup!” This makes sense to police veterans of Occhipinti's cast of mind, who don't define their role in terms of the ability to dominate and intimidate others. Unfortunately, it's the dominate-and-intimidate mindset that defines most contemporary police work – and the resulting steroid use has become deeply entrenched in police departments across the nation.

A November 1989 “60 Minutes” story entitled “Beefing Up the Force” featured “interviews with three police officers whose use of steroids had apparently caused the hyper-aggressiveness that had gotten them into serious trouble,” recounts Dr. John Hoberman. “The worst case involved what one psychiatrist called `a real Jekyll and Hyde change' in the personality of a prison security guard in Oregon who had kidnapped and shot a woman who made a casual remark he didn't like.” At the time the crime was committed, the guard had a testosterone level fifty times higher than normal.

The “60 Minutes” piece focused on a “hard core” group of steroid users on the Miami police force – seven officers called the “River Cops” who in 1987 were implicated in cocaine dealing and conspiracy to commit murder. The trial of an accused murdered of a Broward County Deputy Sheriff suggests that steroid use is still very common among law enforcement officers in that community: An autopsy found anabolic steroids in the slain deputy's muscle tissue, and the accused killer claims that he acted in self-defense when confronted with irrational aggression from the steroid-inflamed officer.

In the late 1980s, Houston police officer Scott Tschirhart, an amateur bodybuilder and known anabolic steroid user, was involved in three lethal shootings of black suspects under exceptionally suspicious circumstances. His fellow officers had observed a distinct change in his attitude and disposition as he cycled through his “gear.” “The bigger he got ... the worse he got about strutting around and bragging,” one of them recalled. “You could really see him changing.” But nothing was done until after Tschirhart was involved in three fatal shootings, and then the only sanction he faced was expulsion from the force.

As of 2004, police in nine states had been accused of crimes related to steroid abuse. The Boston Police Department is still dealing with a recent scandal involving a drug ring inside a police motorcycle unit that dealt in both steroids and cocaine. The accused ringleader, Roberto Pulido, allegedly obtained steroids from a drug dealer in Greece and sold them to at least two other officers. An FBI inquiry into the drug ring resulted in new policy requiring steroid tests for Boston Police officers.

Although disclosures of this sort are uncommon, it's clear that we're not seeing a handful of isolated cases.

“Officer Jimmy,” interviewed by Men's Health for an October 2004 expose, reported that “Steroid use is very pervasive in law enforcement. I'd say, of the cops I know, 20 percent to 25 percent of them are using” steroids. “Jimmy,” who became a police officer in 2000, is a good representative of the new “dominate-intimidate” mindset: He believes – or at least believed at one time – that police are under-utilizing an important tool: “What law enforcement needs is a little testosterone. Every cop should do a [steroid] cycle a year.”

A March 2004 pamphlet published by the DEA's “Office of Diversion Control” underscores the reasons why steroids are so attractive to the likes of “Officer Jimmy”: “The idea of enhanced physical strength and endurance provides one with `the invincible mentality' when performing law enforcement duties.”

Of course, that conceit of invincibility may have more to do with the fact that the steroid-pumping cop carries a gun, is sheathed in body armor, clothed in the power to inflict lethal violence on others at his discretion – and can file criminal charges against any civilian who so much as touches him, or recoils from his touch.

If the government is going to regulate what goes into the bloodstream of individuals, it should focus exclusively on those in its employ, particularly the police. But the larger problem, as always, is the hypertrophied State itself.

On another subject....

Some of you might be aware of another part-time blog I maintain entitled "Notes on the Jerry Seinfeld Society." Since that blog deals with a subject of limited interest, I've not really tried to give it much exposure. The current essay, however, deals with something I consider to be important and more than a little disheartening.

Please be sure to visit The Right Source and the Liberty Minute archive.

Too Short a Season: Derek Hale, Victim of the Homeland Security State, as Remembered by a Friend

Sgt. Derek J. Hale, USMC, who was murdered by police in Wilmington, Delaware last November, was a "great kid -- responsible; well mannered," recalls a man who knew him as a child in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. "It's a damned shame what they did to him out there."

The e-mail continued:

"I managed a baseball card shop that Derek and his friends frequented as teenagers. He was a responsible young man who had his own lawn care business at age 13 [or]14. He took care of our lawn until he graduated from high school. I can remember the day that he decided to join the Marines---he came into the shop and was excited. I watched him grow from a awkward teen who was very nervous and shy around young ladies to a young man who finally found his niche. Unfortunately I didn't get to see him much after he left for the Marines though I kept track of him through this father who lived in Cape as well. "

Derek served two tours in Iraq before being honorably discharged for medical reasons. He was married shortly before leaving the Marine Corps, and celebrated his first anniversary shortly before he was gunned down by the police wolf-pack (8-10 heavily armed officers clad in black, according to eyewitnesses) on the front porch of a friend's home in Wilmington.


"To Protect and Serve"?


Derek was unarmed (police claim to have found a switchblade in his clothing, although his step-brother says Derek never carried one, preferring a Swiss Army Knife instead) and not the subject of an arrest warrant or criminal investigation. Yet he was hit with seven Taser blasts in the space of 73 seconds while several witnesses -- including his friend and her two young children -- looked on in horror and pleaded with the police.

Practically the last thing Derek said before being shot at point-blank range by Lt. William Browne was: "Not in front of the kids -- get the kids out of here."

Derek, who joined the Pagans Motorcycle Club shortly after leaving the Marines, had traveled from Virginia to Delaware as part of a "Toys for Tots" promotion. Some Pagans were suspected of involvement in narcotics-related crimes, but there was never any evidence implicating Derek.
"The `Toys for Tots' thing was something Derek would have done wholeheartedly," comments his friend. "Doing a favor for a friend was something he would have done without question.... There was no way in hell Derek was involved in drugs of any kind."

"I spent many an afternoon talking with Derek when he would visit my store; his character and reputation were beyond reproach," he continues. "I can remember him spending time with an autistic classmate and including the young man in things that he and his friends did together. I have a three-year-old son and I would be most happy if I knew he would turn out to have the character and respect for people (particularly his elders) that Derek had."

Official inquiries depict Derek as a violent criminal whose "defiant" and "menacing" behavior left the heavily armed police -- who outnumbered him at least 8-to-1 -- afraid for their lives. His friend finds that claim to be ridiculous.

"Derek always had a sense of justice and fairness," his friend observes. "There is no way in hell he would have threatened a police posse. When I saw his obit in the local paper I thought he must have been killed in Iraq or something -- but alas our own home-grown terrorists took the life of an innocent man."


"At some point," he concludes, "I would like to call [Derek's] widow and tell her what a fine man her husband was. I've had her number and just didn't feel right about calling her out of the blue, yet I am compelled to offer moral support. I hope that his widow and his parents hang it in the ass of the ... police department and AG's office.... I wish there would be a groundswell of support against the killing of this soldier that murder charges are brought against those terrorists. It is a sad day in a country's history when a soldier can return from two tours of duty in Iraq and can be slain in the streets of his own country by people who get a nut by torturing and killing the people they were hired to protect."

"Our country is going to hell and these patriotic Kool-Aid drinkers are too damned stupid to realize they are being duped by a group of people who count on the American people not thinking for themselves."

If you're interested in helping Derek's family, you can send help to:

The Derek Hale Defense Fund
c/o Dr. David Crowe
1736 Broadway
Cape Girardeau, MO 63701

Or --

Derek Hale Memorial
c/o Beverly at Alliance Bank
P.O. Box 1458
Cape Girardeau, Mo., 63702.

Please be sure to visit The Right Source, and the Liberty Minute archive.