A "Cunning" Plan, A Wrongfully Convicted Man

“Baldrick ... are the words `I have a cunning plan' marching with ill-deserved confidence in the general direction of this conversation?”

Edmund Blackadder, from “Blackadder Goes Fourth”

Time, the subtle thief of youth -- with a corrupt "justice" system as a cohort: Tim Masters as a 15-year-old (left), as a 36-year-old prison inmate today (below).

At age 36, Tim Masters of Fort Collins, Colorado doesn't much resemble the skinny, troubled 15-year-old he was when he was identified as a suspect in the murder and sexual mutilation of 37-year-old Peggy Hettrick. The murder took place in February 1987. Tim, who immediately became a suspect, was convicted of that crime in 1999 and sentenced to life in prison without parole.

His case has now been re-opened by his former defense attorneys, acting with the support of a growing coalition of people convinced that whatever else Tim Masters might be, he is certainly not Peggy Hettrick's murderer – and that he is a victim of a grotesque injustice.

Meanwhile, the two prosecutors who won Masters's conviction on the basis of extravagantly speculative “expert” testimony and the most tenuous of circumstantial evidence, are now working as trial judges. Masters's defenders claim, on the basis of evidence far more compelling than that used to win his conviction, that the prosecutors – Terry Gilmore and Jolene Blair – conspired to withhold vital evidence from the defense.

Among that concealed exculpatory evidence was the existence of a much more credible suspect. Dr. Richard Hammond, an eye doctor who lived near the murder site, committed suicide in 1995 while awaiting trial on sexual misconduct charges. He was accused of rigging a covert surveillance camera in a downstairs bathroom for the purpose of recording close-ups of women's genitalia. Hammond was a social acquaintance of Terry Gilmore. And Hammond, as Tim's defense team wouldn't learn until after he had been convicted, had been investigated in the murder of Peggy Hettrick.

Last July, Erik Fisher – who served as one of Tim's defense attorneys – confronted both Gilmore and Blair over their refusal to disclose the existence of a second suspect in the case. In testimony at a hearing into reopening the case, Fisher testified that the prosecutors-turned-judges told him that they had investigated Dr. Hammond and determined that he was not “a viable suspect,” summarized the Loveland Daily Reporter-Herald.

“They don't get to make that call,” insisted Fisher. “If it's a close case, they don't get to be the defense attorneys [in addition to being the prosecutors] They have to turn it over, then we'll fight about whether he is a viable suspect. That's their obligation.”

This is certainly true in a legitimate adversarial process in which the rules governing discovery are followed by conscientious officers of the court seeking to establish the truth in order to punish a horrible crime and protect the public. Such duty-bound prosecutors – beings apparently as mythical as Jedi Knights – would have disclosed these facts to the defense, knowing that they would be used to sow reasonable doubt in the minds of jurors.

Nathan Chambers, Tim's other defense attorney, believes that this was not an oversight, but an example of incorrigible bad faith and outright prosecutorial corruption.

“I assumed, and I was wrong to do so, that I was dealing with honorable people,” lamented Chambers during his turn on the witness stand. “I assumed that the prosecutors and police would try this case according to the rules.”

Forgive me for saying so, but the fact that Mr. Chambers, an educated, professional adult, could be hostage to such ingenuous beliefs about police and prosecutors suggests that he's just the kind of person who would fall prey to the Nigerian Advance Fee Bank Fraud.

Hammond's home was near the spot where Peggy's body was found. Hammond was interviewed by the police shortly after the murder, but it's not clear when his sexual deviance became known to the authorities. He had a penchant for taking close-up photographs of those specific anatomical features that were mutilated by Peggy's murderer.

Furthermore, Terry Safris, a woman who worked in the bar where Peggy was last seen, and who strongly resembled her, received threatening phone calls. She later spotted a man outside The Prime Minister – a restaurant Peggy visited shortly before being killed – who was making stabbing-like motions with what appeared to be an icicle. The description Terry gave to the police was a very close match for Dr. Hammond: Mid-30s, white, athletic build (Hammond was an avid weightlifter), with sandy hair and a square jaw.

Significant upper-body strength would have been required to drive a five-inch knife blade as quickly and deeply as the murder weapon was used against Peggy -- and then to drag her lifeless body a significant distance from the murder site. This suggested that the murderer was a strong adult man.

Given all of this, why did the police fixate immediately on Tim Masters, a skinny 15-year-old with (at the time) shaggy hair and pipe-cleaner arms? In part, they were misdirected into focusing on Tim because of the untethered musings of behavioral “experts” from the FBI.

The theory of their case, which was taken from a Bazooka Joe-level adaptation of Freud's most emancipated conjectures into human behavior, was that Tim was driven to kill Peggy as a form of “displaced matricide.” Y'see, the murder happened on the anniversary of his own mother's sudden and unexpected death; his mother, like Peggy Hettrick, had red hair. This was what supplied the “motive.” Tim's small collection of knives supposedly provided the “means.”

The “opportunity” element of the case was even less compelling, since it would have been necessary for the 15-year-old to commit the murder at 1:20 am on a school night, drag the body a considerable distance from the actual site of the killing (another detail withheld by the police from the defense), and dispose of every molecule of physical evidence in one exquisitely disciplined outburst of murderous rage directed at a perfect stranger – and still get to school on time the following morning.

Tim first came to the attention of the police when his father Clyde told them that Tim had deviated from his normal route to catch the school bus the morning of the murder. It turned out that the object that had caught Tim's attention, dragging him momentarily away from his familiar footpath, was Hettrick's dead and mangled body.

Like many (far too many, in my view) adolescent males, Tim had an abiding interest in the macabre, and was somewhat desensitized to gore. He told the police later that day – during a six-hour interrogation conducted without an attorney or a parent present – that he gave the corpse a brief once-over, concluded it was probably a mannequin left on the property by friends pulling a sick joke, shrugged his shoulders, and didn't give the matter a second thought.

A search of Tim's bedroom yielded a large volume of supposedly disturbing evidence – a concealed cache of pornography; copies of publications dealing with knives and guns; drawings and stories depicting various violent acts; and a small collection of survival knives. But no physical evidence of any kind connected Tim to the killing.

Roughly a year later, the Ft. Collins Police, aided – no, make that “aided and abetted” -- by the FBI, decided to prepare a “Mission:Impossible”-style psychological trap for Tim.

At the time, the then-16-year-old Tim was already under round-the-clock police surveillance, which produced no evidence of any criminal behavior. The police department decided to publish a series of news releases announcing a “break” in the case – an FBI behavior profile that had narrowed the investigation down to a single suspect. (The FBI took care to ensure that its role would be concealed if things went pear-shaped.)

With the connivance of a local newspaper editor, the police were able to plant their disinformation in the press. And in spite of the fact that the Masters family didn't have a newspaper subscription, police anonymously deposited the paper on the front porch of their trailer every day, and also made sure that relevant clippings were placed on the windshield of a car Tim jointly owned with a friend.

The purpose of this exercise, according to a January 1988 memo from Deryle O'Dell, a police investigator, was to provoke Tim to “exhibit some behavior near the anniversary date that could be an opportunity to further tie him to the case.”

Pressed on the witness stand last week about this “psychological experiment, former police officer Jack Taylor was asked if the idea was for Tim to “freak out and kill someone.”

“Well, hopefully not kill someone,” Taylor responded.

"Hopefully."

Bear in mind that the “links” connecting Tim to the case at that point were about as strong as overcooked Ramen noodles. In fact, the only real connection he had at all was propinquity: Peggy was murdered near his home, but almost as near to Dr. Hammond's as well. Investigators suggested that there was something significant in the fact that the murder site was visible from Tim's home, only to drop that “significant” connection when it was pointed out that it was visible from Hammond's, too.

Click on map to enlarge

In fact, Hammond's depraved porn factory – the basement containing volumes of voyeuristic home-made porn, as well as evidence of a secretive shadow life built around his fetish – was 100 yards away from where Peggy's mutilated body was discovered. After this hoard was discovered in 1992, one of Dr. Hammond's associates described his unusual dexterity with a scalpel, a key consideration given that the sexual mutilation of Peggy's body included intimate excisions that only a skilled surgeon could execute.

Astonishing as it might seem, two detectives investigating Dr. Hammond urged that the doctor be treated as the prime suspect in Peggy's murder, only to see that recommendation come to naught. Lt. Jim Broderick, the lead investigator into the murder, was too busy leaning on police informants to provide him with something – anything – to keep the confected case against Tim alive.

Once again, monomaniacs who had determined that Tim Masters was the culprit. Doubtless they were disappointed – if not deterred – by the fact that Tim didn't act out violently in response to the police department's disinformation campaign in February 1988.

Another possible approach that was discarded by the police would have been to invite Masters, who had indicated some interest in a military career (he went on to serve several years in the Navy, retiring with an honorable discharge) to hang out with an “elite” police tactical team, and ask “how he would hypothetically kill someone if he were ordered to in a military-like setting,” according to a press account.

This would suggest, of course, that displaying a mindset suitable to a SWAT team would make him a plausible murder suspect. Although that assumption strikes me as a sound assessment of SWAT team psychology, the evidentiary value of such an exercise isn't obvious to rational people.

Once again, the police and prosecution deprived Tim's defense team of any knowledge regarding the targeted disinformation campaign. It wasn't until earlier this year that Tim's legal counsel stumbled across official reports describing the gambit.

In any case, insists former police officer Taylor, the ruse really wasn't that important, because “nothing happened. There wasn't anything that gave us an indication one way or another.”

This isn't true, of course: Tim's refusal to be baited into acting out would have provided the defense with yet another key opportunity to plant reasonable doubt in the minds of the jury.

But then again, it shouldn't have been necessary for the defense to cultivate reasonable doubt, because there was no material evidence connecting Tim to the murder. This didn't prevent Ft. Collins police from arresting Tim in Philadelphia in 1998, or the prosecution from putting him on trial for first degree murder when he turned down a plea bargain that would have had him out of prison in eight years – an inconceivably lenient arrangement for someone who committed such a terrifying crime.

The prosecution's case suffered from a complete lack of tangible evidence or direct testimony. However, they did have the singularly well-stocked and formidably credentialed imagination of “forensic psychologist” Dr. Reid Meloy, whose exegesis of Tim's adolescent drawings was depicted by the prosecution as prima facie evidence that he had carried out the murder and mutilation of Peggy Hettrick.

“He admitted his guilt to us through his pictures,” insisted one juror, a comment that makes me wonder if my faith in the jury system is tragically misplaced. Former Ft. Collins police detective Linda Wheeler-Holloway (below), who investigated the Peggy Hettrick case but left the force prior to Tim's arrest, finds it all but incomprehensible that a set of teenage doodles is “the reason why Tim Masters is in prison.” Now with the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, Wheeler-Holloway has been instrumental in re-opening the case.

Disclosure of long-suppressed evidence of misconduct by police and prosecutors may succeed in winning a new trial for Tim Masters, and DNA testing could definitively exonerate him by connecting the late Dr. Hammond to the killing. But even if this best-case scenario were to unfold, these troubling facts would remain:

*An innocent man had at least eight years of his life stolen from him, in large measure because he angered vindictive prosecutors by refusing to surrender eight years of his life without a fight;

*The bizarre, obsessive focus on Tim Masters by Lt. Broderick almost certainly allowed the sex-deviant murderer of Peggy Hettrick to escape punishment for that crime;

*The prosecutors who collaborated in this monumental miscarriage of justice now preside over criminal trials as judges – appointments that were likely in some sense rewards for convicting the supposed killer of Peggy Hettrick.

*A jury of Tim Masters's peers allowed itself to be gulled into convicting that defendant of first-degree murder on the basis of “expert” testimony slightly less credible than Peter Griffin's account of the testimony offered by “The Ghost That Never Lies."

*Despite the patent implausibility of the prosecution's case, and in large measure because of a succesful effort to conceal key facts from the defense, the conviction of Tim Masters was upheld on appeal, all the way to the Colorado State Supreme Court.

To all of this must be added the “cunning” plan by the Ft. Collins police to conscript the “independent” local paper in an effort to provoke a suspected psychopathic murderer into acting out, with potentially lethal consequences to other innocent people.

How often does this kind of thing occur? Color me cynical, but I suspect that an honest answer to that question would be utterly terrifying – more so, even, than the hideous crime committed against Peggy Hettrick.

Dum spiro, pugno!

What's So "Sinister" About "Liberty, Prosperity, and Peace"?

"Setting the realm at rest" through foreign wars: How many of the honored dead whose remains are interred at Arlington really died on behalf of freedom -- rather than for the greater glory of the State?

The true means of setting the realm at rest is by keeping up a foreign war, towards which one can direct, like water in a gutter, all the turbulent humors of the kingdom. --

Duke of Sully, chief minister of France, to King Henry V; cited in Bruce D. Porter, War and the Rise of the State

Behind Ron Paul's facade of genial decency, warned a reader dissatisfied with the guarded enthusiasm for the candidate expressed by Andrew Sullivan of The Atlantic Monthly, lurks a movement catalyzed by hatred – a seething mass of untutored Middle Americans in the thrall of partially digested conspiracy theories and badly sublimated prejudices.

Don't be beguiled by Paul's insistent talk about his campaign being focused on “Liberty, prosperity, and peace,” continued the correspondent – an individual whose hair-trigger paranoia makes him a dubious diagnostician of the hidden hang-ups of other people. After all, some favorable things have been said about his campaign by the likes of David Duke and other denizens of the neo-Nazi netherworld. This isn't because Paul embraces racial collectivism – or collectivism of any sort – but because some elements of that movement share Paul's his opposition to the Iraq war, although for very different reasons.

Is this the face of "hate"?

Sullivan's increasingly agitated reader, who denounces Rep. Paul's opposition to the war as “ignorant and unreasoned,” insists that the Paul phenomenon “isn't some innocent eccentric Congressman riding a popular wave, it is tapping into a very sinister side of the US electorate."

“He is not your friend, not a friend of this country,” concludes the admonitory note to Sullivan.

So ... Ron Paul's views are now to be considered literally anti-American?

Of his brightly defined positions on matters both foreign and domestic, which of them reveal him to be someone who seeks to do injury to the United States?

Is it his consistent opposition to the debasement of the currency, which is destroying the embattled remnants of the middle class? His forthright defense of the Bill of Rights, including all of the troublesome stuff about the inviolable individual right to armed self-defense, and the unconditional necessity of a search warrant as a precondition to government surveillance? His opposition to a National ID card, which would turn us into a “Your Papers, Please” society?

To authoritarian pseudo-conservatives of the sort that make up the neutronium-dense core of the Bu'ushist movement, Dr. Paul's determination to make the government accountable to the Constitution is nothing less than sedition. Their view is best summarized by a statement uttered by the greasy illiterate Andrew Johnson, who became president following Lincoln's assassination: “Whenever you hear a man prating about the Constitution, spot him as a traitor.”

But the real source of animosity toward Ron Paul on the part of the retread Trotskyites called neo-conservatives and those who follow in their train is the congressman's unflinching opposition to the Iraq war and the sanctified “bipartisan foreign policy consensus” that dictates our endless involvement in overseas conflicts.

Despite his enthusiasm for genuine free trade (as opposed to the corporatist/internationalist counterfeit offered through pacts such as NAFTA and organs like the World Trade Organization), Paul is denounced as an “isolationist” -- solely and simply because he would neither subsidize nor slaughter foreigners. In similar fashion, Paul's willingness to pursue a foreign policy based on the peaceful mitigation of disputes in the interest of freedom will be depicted as inspired by “hate.” His most “hateful” act was one of unabashed truth-telling: He has dared to call the regime ruling us an empire, and to insist that this is a bad thing.

Write this down in ink: Ron Paul, who harbors no detectable rancor toward anyone of woman born and goes to exceptional lengths to treat everyone with respect, will be smeared as a “hater.” This is chiefly because of the genuine hatred – born out of fear – he inspires in many who have made their peace with the Power Elite. Their reasoning – if we can torture that word into applying here – would be this: “Obviously he's a hateful man, or else we wouldn't hate him so.”

What is so “sinister” -- to use a word flung at Andrew Sullivan by his frantic correspondent – about a movement seeking “Liberty, prosperity, and peace”?

Well, if that kind of thing catches on, people won't submit to the rule of their betters. Most importantly, they wouldn't support the wars so thoughtfully arranged by their rulers. And without the benign influence of a war to channel and regulate the passions of the hoi polloi, who knows what hideous things will descend on our country? After all, no true friend of this country would seek to deny its inhabitants the opportunity to die in a fruitless and unnecessary foreign war!

Reading the comment about the Ron Paul Revolution representing “a very sinister side of the US electorate” reminded me of Philip Roth's 2004 “alternate history” novel The Plot Against America.

That book represents a perverse accomplishment for Roth, which is the only kind of accomplishment of which he is capable: It is so bad that it eclipses Portnoy's Complaint as the worst offering in Roth's oeuvre.

In The Plot Against America, Roth posits a triumphant America First movement carrying the heroic Charles Lindbergh to the Presidency in 1940, with Montana Senator Burton Wheeler as his Vice President. Lindbergh succeeds in keeping the US out of World War II, thereby depriving the government of a productive outlet for the murderous impulses that Roth and his ilk just know lurk in the bosom of common Americans.

So Lindbergh makes the US a satellite of Nazi Germany, and a benign-sounding, but unmistakably sinister (that word again!) federal program called “Just Folks” is set up to bring about the forcible assimilation of American Jews. The Klan and related groups are turned loose to terrorize Jews and other minorities, and prominent Jewish Americans begin to disappear quietly. The persecution intensifies even further when President Lindbergh disappears (it turns out the Nazis had kidnapped Lindbergh's infant son, using him as blackmail leverage), leaving Wheeler to ascend to the presidency.

Eventually, Lindbergh's wife sides with a group seeking to hold a special presidential election in 1942. FDR is reinstated, and reason – as Roth would see it – is restored to her throne. The Japanese do their part, tardily attacking Pearl Harbor and dragging America into the war that domesticates Middle America by placing it decisively under government's yoke while killing or maiming just enough of its sons to keep that stratum's anti-social tendencies from coalescing into something awful.

One of Roth's characters gives voice to the author's authentically hateful contempt for Middle America in a description of a typical Kentucky farmer. This unassuming figure was depicted as a vulgar specimen of the “Anglo-Saxon Protestants who ran America and would always run it ... [the kind of man who is] able to make a living right out of the earth ... eat only food that he himself has raised.”

Unless reduced to abject dependence on government, or used as the raw material for the State's mission of redemptive violence through warfare, people of that sort are dangerous, at least from the perspective of people like Roth. This is why, from time to time as our rulers see fit, they must arrange a war and use it to bleed out all of the “turbulent humors” of the union

And there's more than a hint of that attitude in the views and policy positions espoused by leading neo-cons, people produced in the same intellectual spawning grounds as Roth (who, although thoroughly wretched, is decidedly not a neo-con himself; that movement hasn't cornered the market on wretchedness).

As I wrote about Roth a number of years ago, his is a genuinely isolationist perspective – the bigoted insularity of a certain variety of Manhattan intellectual who looks westward with a mixture of fear and contempt. And his treatment of pre-WWII Middle America as a population primed to carry out pogroms unless they were shackled to the machinery of foreign war probably prefigures the coming smear campaign against the Ron Paul Revolution.

We will be told that if Americans embrace “Liberty, prosperity, and peace,” we will be shirking our “historic responsibilities” to pacify and democratize the world. Paul's supporters will be reviled as “appeasers,” “defeatists,” or perhaps even “fifth columnists” in the service of the global Jihad. All manner of invidious racial and religious motives will be imputed to the movement, despite the fact that Ron Paul's campaign is a net drawing of every kind. It wouldn't surprise me to see the random provocateur materialize at a Meet-Up somewhere, and become the focus of media attention for a day or two.

Go ahead -- call him a wussy "appeaser," Sean: WWE performer Kane, Pro Wrestler and eager enlistee in the Ron Paul Revolution.

When all of this fails – and it will – I suspect that things will take a still nastier turn.

I write the following at the risk of sounding a bit like a mirror-image of Andrew Sullivan's clinically disturbed correspondent:

If the Ron Paul Movement reaches critical mass, Dr. Paul might find himself in mortal peril. There are too many powerful people deeply invested in a permanent war economy to permit that movement to succeed without making a serious effort to silence its most compelling spokesman. And “lone gunmen” generally don't spontaneously arise from the general population; they tend to be recruited and deployed by murky interests dimly but plausibly connected to those powerful people.

Dr. Paul entered this presidential race knowing that he would be traduced by people paid to assassinate the reputations of honorable men. He's certainly intelligent enough to know that those who orchestrate needless wars are perfectly capable of retaining the services of literal assassins, as well.

This is why Ron Paul's decision to make Peace the central focus of his campaign is the bravest act of statesmanship we'll ever see.

VIDEO EXTRA

I don't know if the Ron Paul “Love Revolution” has an unofficial anthem, but the 1968 classic “People Gotta Be Free” by the Rascals would be a good choice. The live clip below from 1970 suffers terribly from the lack of a bass player (why didn't they have a bass player?), and the tempo is a bit frantic. And of course, the song just isn't the same without the killer horn section. But the energy of this live performance is infectious. For the much slicker studio version, go here.

Dum spiro, pugno!

Right and Wrong

There's a short update below.

So Pat Robertson, an individual who looks as if he had been given life by the pen of a Disney animator (and speaks as though delivering in earnest lines written as satire by Sinclair Lewis), insists that only Adolf – whoops, I mean Rudolph – Giuliani can defend “our population against the bloodlust of Islamic terrorists.”

Giuliani may be a thrice-married, habitually cross-dressing, gun-grabbing, abortion-loving, pederast-coddling wretch, but according to the self-anointed seer of Virginia Beach, Rudy is “a leader with a bold vision who is not afraid to tackle the challenges ahead.”

This is hardly the first time Robertson has discerned the stuff of greatness in an authoritarian politician. In fact, sucking up to corrupt dictators, like ending every homily with a pitch for donations, is for Robertson as irrepressible a reflex.

Ten years ago, two pilots employed by Robertson's “Operation Blessing” revealed that aircraft involved in that ministry had been involved in transporting equipment and other materials for the African Development Company (ADC), a joint venture between Robertson and Mobutu Sese Seko, the late CIA-installed dictator of what used to be called Zaire (now called the Congo).

In fact, Robertson was President and sole stockholder of the ADC, which was chartered in Bermuda in 1992. Shortly thereafter he began to inveigle donations for an Operation Blessing “outreach” to Africa, wheedling widows out of their mites in order to fund a lucrative mining and timber project in Zaire.

Robertson, notes one expose, “continually tried to portray Mobutu as a loyal US ally in the war against international communism. He also emerged as Mobutu's close friend, and probably his most valuable asset in a deceptive campaign to maintain his stature with some ruling circles in the United States. Robertson was wined and dined by Mobutu on the dictator's presidential yacht, and entertained at one of his lavish estates.”

Even in Africa, a continent that has suffered for centuries beneath both colonial rule and post-colonial kleptocracy, Mobutu distinguished himself as a practitioner of graft and plunder. Given that he was raised to power and tutored by the CIA, it shouldn't surprise us that Mobutu created a regime in which torture, indefinite detention, censorship, and official persecution were commonplace.

Mobutu's full self-appointed title, incidentally, meant “The all-powerful warrior who, because of his enduring and inflexible will to win, will go from conquest to conquest leaving fire in his wake.” Perhaps Robertson can weave a similarly prepossessing title for Rudy the Bold.

Indeed, a speech given by Rudy in 1994 – back when Robertson was lobbying diligently on behalf of Mobutu – seems to partake of a sensibility the African despot would share. “What we don't see is that freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be,” insisted Rudy. “Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.”

For Robertson, “Freedom” -- like “Salvation” -- is little more than a marketing buzzword. This is illustrated by another of Pat's African ventures, the so-called Freedom Gold Limited enterprise in Liberia.

Like the ADC, Freedom Gold was born in a Caribbean haven for off-shore investment scams, in this case the Cayman Islands. Once again, Robertson was listed as the president of the enterprise, as well as sole director thereof. But in this case, there was at least one other shareholder – Charles Taylor, the former president of Liberia.

Taylor was a more difficult sell than Mobutu as an ally against international terrorism. Indicted for embezzlement, Taylor was arrested while visiting the US in 1980 and held in jail to await extradition. He and his cohorts broke jail and fled to Libya, where they received instruction in Libyan ruler Moammar Ghadhafi's Soviet-sponsored terrorist training camps. After ascending to the Liberian presidency, Taylor would refer to Libya as his “second country.” Ghadhafi helped underwrite Taylor's war against neighboring Sierra Leone in the late 1990s.

In recent years, thanks in no small measure to productions such as Blood Diamond, the public has become somewhat familiar with one trademark tactic of forces backed by Taylor: The mutilation of innocent people, including women and children, by hacking off their limbs with machetes.

A child in Sierra Leone shows the handiwork of forces backed by Charles Taylor, one of Pat Robertson's business partners.

After the Bush administration condemned Taylor's rule in 2003, Robertson condemned Washington for undermining “a Christian, Baptist president to bring in Muslim rebels....”

“How dare the president of the United States say to the duly elected president of another country, 'You've got to step down,'” fulminated Robertson, the same figure who a few years later would call for the summary assassination of Venezuelan ruler Hugo Chavez.

Like many other corporate leaders seeking access to China, Robertson has defended Beijing's one-child policy, which results in coerced abortion and female infanticide.

“[T]hey've got 1.2 billion people, and they don't know what to do,” Robertson insisted in a 2001 CNN interview. “If every family over there was allowed to have three or four children, the population would be completely unsustainable.... I think that right now they're doing what they have to do. I don't agree with the forced abortion [policy], but I don't think the United States needs to interfere with what they're doing internally in this regard.”

The question, of course, is not whether the US government should interfere in China's affairs, but whether or not Robertson, as a purported man of God and proponent of the sanctity of life, would condemn the Chinese regime for a policy so abhorrent that it is opposed even by some who support abortion on demand. Rather than doing so, Robertson – seeking to be a “Friend of China” (which in practice means “friend of the worst elements of the Chinese government,” rather than friend of the Chinese people) regurgitated Beijing's party line, in which the problem is too many people – rather than too much coercion.

Despotism portrayed in soft pastels: A Chinese government agitprop poster for its one-child policy, which includes forced abortion and female infanticide. Pat Robertson insisted that Beijing's abhorrent policy was necessary in order to achieve a "sustainable" population.

Given these bona fides, nobody should be surprised in the least that Robertson would eagerly endorse the most freedom-aversive of the Republican presidential aspirants. After all, Pat has long been in the habit of anointing the posteriors of thugs and dictators with his lips if that's the price of doing business.

Rudolph Giuliani really is the distilled essence of contemporary conservatism. He is almost miraculously devoid of charm or charisma, completely unfettered by principle, and utterly devoted to the aggrandizement of building and retaining State power at whatever cost. Robertson's action in cleaving to Giuliani bears eloquent testimony regarding the true focus of his devotion, whatever pieties may tumble from his lips for public consumption.

Update

There were present at that season some that told him of the Galilaeans, whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices.
And Jesus answering said unto them, Suppose ye that these Galilaeans were sinners above all the Galilaeans, because they suffered such things?
I tell you, Nay: but, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.
Or those eighteen, upon whom the tower in Siloam fell, and slew them, think ye that they were sinners above all men that dwelt in Jerusalem?
I tell you, Nay: but, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.

Luke 13:1-5 (KJV)


That's the chief lesson Jesus would have us extract from conspicuous examples of suffering and tragedy: Life is brief, and it can end very badly practically anytime; all of us (except for Him) are sinners who need to be reconciled to God as quickly as possible. We don't have the right, or the luxury, of auditing the sins of others (which doesn't mean, of course, that we're required to pretend that sin doesn't exist).

It might be useful to bear that passage from Luke in mind while contemplating the infamous post-9-11 colloquy between Pat Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell in which these two titans of the "Christian" Right sought to divvy up the blame for the incident.

Giuliani, with whom Robertson allied himself today, attempted to banish Ron Paul from the realm of respectability when Dr. Paul correctly said that the 9-11 attacks (per the accepted narrative of those incidents) were "blowback" generated by Washington's interventionist foreign policy. Yet the same Rudy Giuliani has now drawn to his bosom a figure who lays most of the blame for that incident at the feet of -- well, social policy leftists such as himself.

Obviously, the Rudester was happy to welcome Robertson's endorsement out of vulgar opportunism. But if Robertson were sincere in agreeing with Falwell's views in the immediate aftermath of 9-11, he wouldn't have come within a parsec of endorsing Giuliani.

Video Extra

So we see that key "Christian" Right leaders have separated into factions supporting two Eastern Seaboard totalitarians -- Bob Jones III and Paul Weyrich backing Romney, and Pat Robertson backing Giuliani -- while ignoring the sole authentic Christian statesman in the race, the estimable Rep. Ron Paul. Meanwhile, Dr. Paul continues to build an unprecedented movement that is almost entirely self-propelled by freedom-focused people from across the political spectrum.

What the Ron Paul movement ("campaign" may be an inapt term) represents is an emerging trans-partisan uprising against the Empire. On that note I offer the following clip of the talented but not telegenic Joe Jackson performing the tune I nominate to be the anthem of the Trans-partisan Freedom Movement: "Right and Wrong."

Dum spiro, pugno!

Further On Up The Road

By now, we've become inured to the grotesque spectacle of Bush Regime appointees behaving as if the rules of reality can be suspended at the whim of the Grand and Glorious Decider. Thus it is with a dull sense of soul-weary duty, rather than with an acute sense of outrage freshly whetted against a novel form of evil, that we examine the casual ratification of the practice of “waterboarding” -- that is, controlled drowning – resulting from Senate confirmation hearings for Michael Mukasey.

Mr. Mukasey was advertised as a sober, independent jurist not beholden to the Bush Regime's dictatorial dogmas. Yet on the razor's-edge question of a defining claim of dictatorial power – that is, can the president authorize torture, in the specific form of “waterboarding”? -- Mukasey revealed himself to be a Bu'ushist in full.

Replying in writing to a Senate Judiciary Committee inquiry, Mukasey insisted that he personally finds waterboarding “repugnant” but not necessarily illegal.

“I said at the hearing that torture violates the law and the Constitution, and the president may not authorize it as he is no less bound by constitutional restrictions than any other government official,” wrote Mukasey. He also acknowledged that military personnel are expressly prohibited from subjecting a detainee to “waterboarding” under the Detainee Treatment Act and the Field Manual on Intelligence.

If you hear a Limbaugh-sized “but” in the offing, you're absolutely correct.

With respect to the use of that technique by civilian interrogators, such as CIA officials, Mukasey engaged in a prolonged exercise in omphaloskepsis, refusing to rule out the practice of waterboarding since it is not specifically described as “torture” in an existing statute. The same is true, of course, of myriad other sadistic exercises currently in use or yet to be invented by the perverse ingenuity of fallen man, any of which could be pressed into service by the Bu'ushists or their successors.

There is no ambiguity here as to whether waterboarding is torture. It was identified as such for the purpose of prosecuting as war criminals those Japanese military police who practiced it as an intelligence and counter-insurgency measure. African warlords found it useful in sowing terror and despair among their opponents. The Khmer Rouge, who didn't flinch from using every depraved and barbarous tool devised by their singularly resourceful imagination, found waterboarding to be their most effective torture protocol.

In a letter of their own (.pdf) to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, former Judge Advocates General for all four branches of the military wrote: “Waterboarding detainees amounts to illegal torture in all circumstances. To suggest otherwise -- or even to give credence to such a suggestion -- represents both an affront to the law and to the core values of our nation.” (Emphasis added.)

And yet, those loyal to the cult of the Dear Leader affect a puzzled agnosticism when asked if waterboarding is illegal torture, rather than a permissible form of “enhanced interrogation.”

Mukasey, faithfully following The Decider's example, took refuge in circular reasoning: Torture is illegal; the administration practices waterboarding; therefore, waterboarding can't be illegal, because the administration practices it.

Acting like an idiot – and a dishonest one, at that – for public consumption was a relatively trivial sacrifice for Mukasey. Daniel Levin, former acting assistant Attorney General, made a more substantial sacrifice in the service of The Decider's torture prerogative.

A diagram illustrating a waterboarding technique favored by African warlords during a conflict in Chad.

In 2004, Levin voluntarily underwent waterboarding at a US military facility in order to determine whether it constitutes torture. Even though he was in friendly hands that withheld the worst from him, and surrounded by medical personnel ready to administer help to him, Levin found the experience utterly terrifying.

And yet ... even then he couldn't bring himself to say that the practice “amounts to illegal torture in all circumstances,” as the JAG officers observed. Instead, he wrote that it could be regarded as illegal torture unless carried out in a highly limited way under appropriate supervision.

Levin's December 2004 memo on interrogation, which described torture as “abhorrent,” contained a footnote pointedly denying that the previous Bush Regime legal opinions on the subject were incorrect. Levin was instructed to revise his memo to highlight the substance of his footnote – namely, that torture was still legal, whether or not it was expressly forbidden by law. But Levin was forced out by other Regime officials who caught the scent of heresy and apostasy wafting from the first draft of his memo.

With the connivance of key Democrats – chiefly the execrable Charles Schumer – Mukasey appears headed for confirmation. Meanwhile, John Bellinger, the chief legal aide to Secretary of State Rice, has pointedly refused to describe waterboarding of US citizens as illegal – even when carried out by foreign intelligence agencies:

Philippe Sands [BBC reporter]: Let me put it in yet another way. Could you imagine any circumstances in which the use of water boarding on an American national by a foreign intelligence service could be justified?

John Bellinger: One would have to apply the facts to the law, the law to the facts, to determine whether any technique, whatever it happened to be, would cause severe physical pain or suffering.

Philippe Sands: So you're willing to exclude any American going to the international criminal court under any circumstances, but you're not able to exclude the possibility of water boarding being used on a United States national by foreign intelligence service? I mean, that just strikes me as very curious.

John Bellinger: Well, I'm not willing to include it or exclude it, I mean, these are issues that our justice department as a matter of interpreting both the domestic law on torture and international law, has concluded that just don't want to get involved in abstract discussions of applying the law to any set of facts.

How should the question of US citizens suffering torture at the hands of foreign interrogators be considered “an abstract discussion”? So zealous is the Bush Regime to protect its self-issued license to torture that it has now validated the arguments used by Japanese war criminals six decades ago to justify their own torture of American servicemen.

As the song says, “You're gonna reap just what you sow – that old sayin' is true ... Just like you mistreat someone, someone's gonna mistreat you.... Further on up the road.”

Bush and his claque aren't likely to suffer for their criminal policies (although hope endures). But they have now openly admitted that, where waterboarding is concerned, Americans are quite likely to catch the hell our rulers have sown.

Video Extra

There was a time when conservatives denounced “situational ethics,” rather than pioneering new frontiers in the same. Even though it might be too much to ask conservatives to keep their categorical imperatives in line, couldn't they at least understand the elemental logic of payback?

There's wisdom in the lyrics of the blues standard performed below by the immortal Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck. The performance is (appropriately enough) from a 1981 London concert called “The Secret Policeman's Other Ball,” a fundraiser for Amnesty International's commendable efforts to combat torture.

Mssrs. Clapton and Beck swap 24-bar leads. Clapton's are elegant. Beck's are incendiary

Dum spiro, pugno!

Federal Prosecutors: A Human Pestilence

There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. --

Dr. Ferris, a bureaucratic parasite, explains the governing principle of “soft totalitarianism” to industrialist Hank Rearden in Atlas Shrugged

Oh, what fun it is to tear up the Constitution and ruin lives needlessly!
Federal Prosecutor Randy Massey clearly enjoys his work. After all, there's not as much money in his former career as a Captain Kangaroo Impersonator.

The April 28, 2006 press release from Randy G. Massey, Acting US Attorney for the Southern District of Illinois, emitted the familiar stench of bureaucratic self-congratulation: It announced the indictment by a federal grand jury of 27-year-old Katie R. Heath for “conspiracy to manufacture, distribute, and possess with intent to distribute over 500 grams of methamphetamine in Saline County and elsewhere in the United States.”

Miss Heath, the announcement explained, was taken into custody by bold and heroic law enforcement officers during a “pre-dawn sweep.” Some measure of the seriousness of the crimes allegedly committed by Heath, we are to understand, can be found in the maximum prescribed penalties: Up to life imprisonment and a $4 million fine.

Katie Heath's case does present one substantial problem: At the time of her arrest she was neither using nor distributing drugs. She had been paroled from prison just three months earlier after serving one year of a four-year sentence for the same acts listed in the federal indictment.

The plain and obvious meaning of the Fifth Amendment's prohibition against double jeopardy dictates that what Massey seeks to do here is impermissible. Then again, the division of labor described by James Madison in Federalist Paper number 45 – with the scope of federal criminal prosecutions limited to “few and defined” matters, none of which deals with narcotics – almost certainly means that Massey shouldn't have his job in the first place.

In the 1922 case US v. Lanza, the Supreme Court devised a way to nullify the Fifth Amendment's guarantee against double jeopardy: It created a perverse variant of the concept of federalism by describing the states and the federal government as different “sovereignties ... deriving power from different sources, capable of dealing with the same subject matter within the same territory.”

Appropriately, the “subject” of the enforcement action leading to this decision was the demented effort to prohibit production and consumption of alcohol, the direct antecedent to our contemporary “war on drugs.”

It might be remembered that this “dual sovereignties” concept was employed in the early 1990s to justify a federal “civil rights” conviction of officers involved in the Rodney King arrest, after they had been acquitted by a local jury.

Once the division of labor described by Madison is understood, it becomes clear that federal laws against narcotics use and distribution are constitutionally unsupportable; this point is buttressed by the fact that the pseudo-puritanical totalitarians behind prohibition understood that it was necessary to amend the Constitution in order to give the federal government power to criminalize the traffic in intoxicants.

Notwithstanding the tortured sophistries offered by people who subsist on unnecessary human misery – that is, servants and employees of Leviathan – it is clear that Katie Heath was facing double jeopardy.

Of that troubled young mother, Federal Judge J. Phil Gilbert has said: “She's no saint. She got caught up in drug addiction and made bad choices that resulted in her spending a year in state prison.” The youngest of her three small children was born in prison. Once she was paroled (the term “parole,” by the way, is a synonym for “acquittal” and close kindred of the verb “to forgive”) Katie went to school, held down a job, and tested clean for drug use. Judge Gilbert points out that after her indictment Katie made a good faith effort to cooperate with federal prosecutors.

Nevertheless, Massey decided to “enhance” the charges against Heath so that she would face a mandatory minimum sentence of 20 years in prison. That “enhancement” must be viewed by honest people as the creation, after-the-fact, of a new offense from the raw materials provided by the same acts for which Heath had already been punished.

Why did Massey and his comrades in the US Attorney's Office do this?

“Because they can,” answers Judge Gilbert.

Soviet Prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky (center), patron "saint" of corrupt prosecutors everywhere and unacknowledged role model for most US Attorneys, reads an indictment during a 1937 Soviet show trial.

"Because they can."

That phrase, and variants of it, is the final answer of the bully, the thug, the tyrant, the torturer; it would serve quite nicely as the official motto of the emerging Homeland Security State.















Judge Gilbert does not have a reputation for leniency. Yet this spectacularly corrupt and abusive decision, typical of what he calls “a culture that has been going on in this district for eight or nine years,” provoked him to resist. When Heath attempted to plead guilty to the manufactured federal conspiracy charge in the forlorn hope of receiving a relatively light sentence, Gilbert simply refused to accept the plea.

Gilbert's apparent hope – as forlorn as Heath's – was that a there was a human being inside the officious, power-intoxicated creature called Randy G. Massey, and that said human being would be susceptible to a sense of decent shame over this act of gratuitous official sadism.

But federal prosecutors appear to be drawn from a pool of beings immune to such decent and elevated sentiments. Additionally, federal sentencing guidelines given prosecutors broad and unaccountable discretion in these matters.

So Massey and his comrades applied successfully to the 7^th U.S. Court of Appeals for a writ of mandamus, which would compel Judge Gilbert to impose the desired sentence. Gilbert responded by doing something perilously close to the honorable thing: He recused himself from the case, rather than accepting Heath's guilty plea and thereby sealing her fate.

The unambiguously honorable thing would be for Gilbert to resign and join the movement to end the “war on drugs.” Perhaps in time the judge will do so.

“Prosecutors are driven by statistics and a desire to prevent judges from exercising any control over the sentencing process without regard for the individual,” observes Gilbert. “Although not rising to the level of mean-spiritedness, the words `arbitrary' and `capricious' come to mind.”

Well ... no. This assessment is too mild by a couple orders of magnitude.

“Mean-spiritedness” is a term used to describe criticism, not the theft of two decades of a woman's life on a patently dishonest pretext. And there's nothing commendable about Gilbert's restraint in criticizing Massey's little clique. Katie Heath wasn't able to utter a syllable to criticism, lest she be accused of “non-cooperation” with the Feds; Gilbert – as far as I know – is under no similar restraints. He ought to rummage around in his rhetorical nap-sack in search of more potent imprecations and hurl a few of them in Massey's direction.

(J.D. Tuccille, Radley Balko, and Jacob Sullum have all written perceptive accounts of this outrage.)

A Personal Note

Thanks, once again, for the kind wishes, prayers, and other generous help offered on behalf of Korrin and my family. And I wish to apologize for my scanty offerings this week. With Korrin in the hospital and most of us at home -- including myself -- succumbing to the flu, my productivity has suffered a bit. Please stay tuned for posts over the weekend. Thanks!

Gratuitous Video Feature

Harry Shearer's "Waterboardin,' U.S.A."

Dum spiro, pugno!