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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Gaia's Jolly Jokesters

Suetonious records that while attending the Circensian Games the Emperor Caligula was so offended by a public display of support for one of his critics that he exclaimed: "I wish the Roman people had but one neck!" 

 It's possible that "Little Boots" intended that outburst as a joke. If so, the depraved tyrant had a sense of humor quite similar to the one displayed by the 10:10 Campaign, an English environmentalist group that seeks to hector the public into reducing its collective "carbon footprint."

On October 1, 10:10 rolled out a four-minute film -- written by the immensely talented Richard Curtis -- entitled "No Pressure." The film is a series of vignettes involving an updated riff on Caligula's depraved daydream. Each of the short scenes features an environmentally enlightened authority figure -- a teacher, a middle manager at a corporation, and a soccer coach -- extolling the virtues of those who are willing to take part in the grand campaign of collective self-sacrifice on behalf of Gaia.

In each setting those not convinced of the wisdom of this undertaking were asked -- after being assured that "no pressure" would be used to impose conformity -- to identify themselves. This being done, the commissar pushed a large red button that caused the eco-heretics to explode, thereby drenching the stunned and terrified faithful in the liquefied viscera of the less enlightened. 

The closing voice-over -- performed over the haunting strains of Radiohead's "Weird Fishes" --  briefly lists some of the institutions and political figures who have signed on to the 10:10 Campaign, ending with the tagline: "Care to join us? No pressure."

 ***

***

No Pressure was unveiled to representatives of government-recognized charitable groups on October 1. It went over about as well as Gilbert Gottfried's notorious post-9/11 joke at Hugh Hefner's Friar's Club roast ("I have to fly from New York to L.A. tomorrow, and I couldn't get a connecting flight -- we have to stop at the Empire State Building first"). 

"Our job is to encourage proactive decisions at class level to reduce carbon emissions," sniffed ActionAid, which is presiding over 10:10's schoolroom indoctrination efforts. "We did it because evidence shows children are deeply concerned about climate change.... So we think the 10:10 campaign is very important, but the moment this film was seen it was clear it was inappropriate."


Were an inmate of the government school system in either the People's Republic of Blighty or the U.S.S.A. to submit a student film depicting fantasies of mass murder, he would be charged with terrorism and consigned to the nearest psychiatric gulag. Yet when the same diseased fantasy is submitted by a government-aligned eco-lobby, the sternest adjective used to describe it is "inappropriate." There's something other than the storied British understatement at work here.


The 10:10 campaign's official reaction is a variation on the familiar non-apology, "I'm sorry that you were offended" -- a formulation commonly used by people seeking to deflect blame for genuinely offensive acts.

A premature environmentalist: Sade

"Many people found [No Pressure] extremely funny, but unfortunately some didn't and 10:10 would like to apologise to everybody who was offended by the film," stated 10:10 global campaign director Lizzie Gillet.  Fanny Armstrong, founder of 10:10, recited the same potted non-apology: "When the film was released ... lots of people found it funny, but many others were offended. Out of respect for those we offended, we immediately apologised and withdrew the film."


I'm struck by the fact that 10:10's "apology" follows the same collectivist logic displayed in its perverted mass murder fantasy: The enlightened understand the joke, even if a few reactionary holdouts aren't enchanted by it. Pity, isn't it, that we don't have a master detonator that would reduce such charmless people to a bloody mist?

The real problem for 10:10 is not that the stolid bourgeois didn't find No Pressure funny; instead, it's that the film laid bare the totalitarian misanthropy that resides at the core of the radical environmentalist movement. Progressives are expected to epater le bouregoise, and they revel in giving offense. Giving away their true intentions is a much more serious matter. 


"It has been suggested  that we call a United Species Conference -- a conference far more representative than the United Nations is - and put this one question to the ten million representatives (one for each species): `Should the human species be allowed to continue on this planet?'" wrote eco-theologian Matthew Fox in his book The Coming of the Cosmic Christ. "The vote would most likely be 9,999,999 to 1 that we humans, with our dualistic hatred of earth ... be banished to some distant place in the galaxy so that Mother Earth could resume her birthing of beauty, amazement, colors, and health." 

Fox is a peripheral figure. David Graber, Chief Scientist for the Pacific West Region of the National Park Service, is not. In a 1989 book review for the Los Angeles Times, Graber unflinchingly expressed the idea that in order for Gaia to prosper, countless millions of human beings must die.


"Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, are not as important as a wild and healthy planet," insisted Graber. "I know social scientists who remind me that people are a part of nature, but that isn't true.... We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the earth. Until such time as homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along."


Oh, if only the unregenerate masses had a single neck that could be severed by an immense guillotine -- or if the exalted "some of us" to whom Graber refers could annihilate the rest by pushing a single red button. 


"Anything that reduces human populations or reduces their growth is a benefit to just about everything else on the planet," Graber said in a 1999 Reason magazine interview. "Ecology is a game where some win and some lose," he continued, and in that conflict human beings have no greater intrinsic worth than other organisms. Pointing out that "Death is by far the crudest and cruelest solution to a problem of crowding," Graber did express at least a measure of sympathy for the human victims of what he considers to be an inevitable culling-out process. Repellent as his ideas may be, Graber apparently doesn't traffic in self-indulgent, sadistic "humor" of the kind found so winsome by the people behind the 10:10 Campaign. 

The term "sadism" is singularly appropriate here, given that the Marquis de Sade, from whose name that term derives, gave voice to ideas very similar to those dramatized in the No Pressure film. 


Decades ago, while researching an article on the "culture war," I made the mistake of trying to read Sade's Juliette, in which the author laid out what passed for his philosophy. Sade's opus reads like what might result were Larry Flynt to dictate a novel under the influence of Tourette's syndrome. I quickly discovered that the book -- as Dorothy Parker might put it -- was not one to be set aside lightly, but to be thrown away with great force. I was able to endure just a few chapters before a hurling both the book and my gorge. 


Sade is widely recognized as a libertine, and regarded by some misinformed people as an individualist. He was certainly devoted to the unqualified service of emancipated appetites, but he had nothing but disdain for the non-aggression principle: "Were I to discover that my only possibility of happiness lay in excessive perpetration of the most atrocious crimes, without qualm I'd enact every last one of them this very instant, certain ... that the foremost of the laws Nature decrees to me is to enjoy myself, no matter at whose expense." (Emphasis in the original.)


By way of social prescription, Sade recommended that children (those who survived abortion and infanticide, both of which he believed should be commonplace) should be treated as property of the State. 

"[Let us] create public schools where, as soon as they are weaned, the young may be reared; installed therein as ward of the State, the child can forget even his mother's name,"opined Sade through one of his literary creations. This element of Sade's manifesto resonates with the opening scene from the No Pressure film, in which a schoolteacher enlists children as eco-socialist missionaries with a commission to convert their parents. 


Significantly, Sade was on the same page with modern "Deep Ecologists" like David Graber and the 10:10 collective, who believe that human beings are alienated from the environment. "Nature stands in not the slightest need of [human] propagation," he wrote, "and the total disappearance of mankind ... would grieve her very little." 

This is the same deified "Nature," recall, that according to Sade, had ordained self-gratification of the elite as its highest law. So why couldn't Nature's priestly class get its jollies by liquidating everybody who disagrees with them? If there is a problem with this suggestion, Sade couldn't identify it: "If from immolating three million human victims you stand to gain no livelier pleasure than that to be had from eating a good dinner, you ought to treat yourself to it without an instant's hesitation."

Sade would see the humor in 10:10's No Pressure film, which isn't so much an exercise in persuading the unconvinced as an expression by the bien-pensants of their self-satisfied, bottomless contempt for those of us who don't share their theology. 

After the audience at the Hugh Hefner Roast turned against Gilbert Gottfried for his 9/11-themed joke, the adenoidal comedian did exactly as Sade would prescribe: He doubled down on the depravity, winning back the audience by telling the filthiest joke imaginable. This isn't surprising, given the crowd to which he was playing. 

I wouldn't be surprised to see Sade's disciples a the 10:10 Campaign take a similar approach. Given that their opening bid was to use mass murder as a punchline, I find myself wondering what they will do for an encore. 

(Note: This version has been corrected with valuable input from sharp-eyed readers; thanks!)


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Dum spiro, pugno!

Liars for Hire: The Alchemy of Provocation

 

Patsy du jour: Hassoun

For reasons the FBI has yet to disclose, in 2009 the Bureau became interested in a young man named Sami Samir Hassoun, who had immigrated to the United States from Lebanon. 

 Although his family came from a Shia-dominated region of that country, Hassoun was never particularly religious. He was, according to friends, exceptionally intelligent (he attended an elite school, studied medicine briefly, and is fluent in English and French as well as Arabic) and given to boasting.

Chicago restaurant owner Joseph Abraham recalls that Hassoun "wanted to make fast money" and lusted after personal fame. He succeeded in becoming a global celebrity of sorts on September 19 when he  was arrested by a throng of FBI agents and Chicago cops  after he deposited what he thought was a powerful bomb outside a bar near Wrigley Field.

 The device had been manufactured at an FBI counter-terrorism lab in Quantico, Virginia, and supplied to Hassoun by two undercover FBI agents posing as terrorism financiers. The agents paid the young man $2,700 to quit his day job -- and promised him a great deal more -- to work full-time brainstorming various terrorist plots against targets in Chicago. 

 "My client didn't bring anything of his own making to the incident," maintains Hassoun's defense attorney Myron Auerbach. "Things were given to him." Hassoun, according to his friend Joseph Abraham (who knew him as a delivery man for a nearby bakery), had a fertile imagination, a gift for self-dramatization, and occasional difficulty in telling the unadorned truth. All of those traits appear to have worked in unfortunate synergy to get the young man into trouble. There is little in Hassoun's background to suggest a future career in terrorism, absent the FBI's intervention. Why did the FBI approach him in the first place?


Hassoun had no criminal record or background in violent or radical groups. According to FBI Special Agent Samuel Hartman, who swore out the criminal complaint against Hassoun, the decision to pair him up with an undercover provocateur was based on “information relating to Hassoun that is unrelated to this matter." This suggests, at least to hardened cynics like myself, that the Bureau was trolling for patsies and learned something about Hassoun that they considered an exploitable vulnerability. 

Although he was never particularly religious, Hassoun's family came from a Shia-dominated region of Lebanon. Seeking to escape the political violence afflicting their home country, Hassoun's family migrated to the Ivory Coast, only to return after that country experienced one of its frequent military coups before eventually immigrating to the U.S. 

Perhaps the FBI's talent scouts learned of Hassoun's background and believed it would make him receptive to the Bureau's standard terrorist recruitment pitch, which lures Muslims into "sting" operations by playing on their understandable resentment toward Washington's foreign policy.

After Hassoun had been prepped by the FBI's paid provocateur, he was approached by two undercover agents (identified in the complaint as "UC-1" and "UC-2"). According to the FBI affidavit, “UC-2 state[d] his purported purpose: `want[ing] to change how our country [i.e., the United States] treats our people back home.’ In response, Hassoun stated that he was differently motivated: `Mine is a kind of different concept than this.’ Hassoun explained he saw attacking Chicago as a means of creating chaos to gain political control of the city and its sources of revenue.”

 For about a year, the FBI team of alchemist provocateurs worked to transmute the impulsive musings of an immature college-age man into a "terrorist plot." At first, he didn't give them much to work with.

 Hassoun’s original ideas, reports footnote 15 on page 10 of the FBI's affidavit, included the use of a “device that appeared as a toy that when activated would cause a minor explosion that would not cause injury, but would expel tiny notes containing ominous warnings.” He also suggested that he and his supposed friends “could design a bomb that would not explode, but be deployed in a manner that it would appear that it was discovered prior to a planned detonation.”

While spit-balling proposed “plots” with the FBI's undercover provocateur, Hassoun repeatedly emphasized his opposition to bloodshed: “No killing. There is no killing.” His insistence on avoiding lethal violence extended beyond “civilians” to include the police, as well: “When you hit the police, you don’t kill the police.” He was willing to “harm” the police — most likely through humiliation, rather than actual violence — as a way of discrediting them, but he appears to have been resolutely opposed to actual violence. Until, that is, the undercover Feds showed up and started gently guiding him in a more militant direction.

Hassoun’s arrest triggered the predictable headlines and commentary describing yet another daring interdiction of a Jihadist plot by the Homeland’s valiant defenders, oh may they be praised forever. In fact, the criminal complaint specifies (for the most part in footnotes) that Hassoun was not motivated by Islam or any other religion. 

The document also indicates that he wasn’t interested in killing or harming anybody until long after he fell under the influence of the FBI's little troupe of Homeland Security Theater players. Rather than advancing the “Islamist agenda,” Hassoun allegedly suggested that Muslims could make useful scapegoats.

“Although Hassoun was clear that he was not motivated to attack Chicago based on any religious ideology, he nevertheless suggested that once attacks had taken place, the participants distance themselves from their actions by sending an attribution video to the media claiming responsibility for the violence in the name of a fictitious extremist organization,” claims footnote 22 on page 15 of the complaint.  “Call it, `the jihad in U.S.’ Just make something up," Hassoun is quoted as suggesting. "You know? Just make it up so, like, when you put it, all the heat is transferred to them. You know? There’s no heat in the street.’”

This is to say that Hassoun supposedly proposed a “false-flag operation.” Where on earth would he get an idea of that kind? Here's a thought: Might he have learned something about this tactic from the friendly people at the FBI, who are masters of the art of manufacturing phony terrorist plots?

In this connection it's interesting to note that Shahed Hussain, the Pakistani-born FBI provocateur who confected the so-called “Newburgh 4″ bombing plot in New York, recently admitted under oath that the FBI sent him to a terrorist training camp in his home country in December 2009. This happened while he was playing the role of a wealthy terrorist recruiter in the employ of the Pakistani group Jaish-e-Mohammed as part of a “sting” targeting four marginalized, desperate losers. 

Provocateur-Prevaricator Hussain on the stand.

On the witness stand, Hussain -- who, in addition to being a veteran con artist, appears to be the scion of a wealthy Pakistani family that knew Benazir Bhutto -- has been repeatedly rebuked by Judge Colleen McMahon (who has actually referred to the trial as an "un-terrorism case").  When finally cornered by the attorneys representing those targeted in his sting, Hussain's answers did nothing to help the prosecution's case.

"Everything coming out of your mouth was a lie for that 11-month period when you were meeting with these men, right?" asked defense attorney Vincent Bricetti.


"Yes" Hussain answered.


When working as a paid FBI informant, "it's helpful to be a really good liar, isn't it?" Bricetti continued, eliciting a grudging affirmative response from the witness. 


"I love to work for the FBI," Hussain explained. "I enjoy the work I do, that's why I do it."

As the jury chokes on Hussain's malodorous testimony, the prosecution has been reduced to abject whining. "The government is entitled to a fair trial," simpered Assistant U.S. Attorney Jason Halperin, who considers it entirely unfair that the defense is permitted to challenge the credibility of the FBI's hired liar. 

It's entirely likely that a purulent personality of that kind is at the center of the most recent terror charade in Chicago. If so, it would be fascinating to see what would ooze out of him under cross-examination during Hassoun's trial. 


As cases of this kind accumulate, it's becoming incontestably clear that  “Jihad Central” isn’t found in Riyadh, Tehran, or — as some earnest but misled people insist — Moscow. It’s in Virginia — specifically, Langley and Quantico. 

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Dum spiro, pugno!

No Law? No Warrant? No Problem!

"Do you expect to see any violence here today?"

"I certainly hope so." --

Narcotics officer Sgt. Stedenko, aka "Hardhat," answers a reporter's question at a drug checkpoint on the U.S.- Mexican border, from the film Up In Smoke.


Sal Agro, a 67-year-old man from Lake Orion, Michigan, died of a heart attack on September 2. Although those responsible for Agro's untimely death will never admit as much, he was the victim of an act of state terrorism carried out a week earlier by the Oakland County Sheriff's Office

Agro, along with his son, helped operate a treatment center in nearby Ferndale called Clinical Relief that provided medical marijuana to physician-approved clients under a 2008 Michigan state law. Sal, who had recently undergone hip surgery, was authorized to grow and use marijuana himself. His wife was authorized both to use marijuana and provide it to others as a caregiver. They had invited local officials to inspect the Clinical Relief facility.

He obeyed the rules, and they killed him anyway: Sal Agro, RIP.

Last June, with at least eight applications pending to open facilities like Clinical Relief, the Ferndale City Council imposed a temporary moratorium on dispensing medical marijuana while it explored new ways to harass the facilities through zoning restrictions. This prompted an objection from Mayor Craig Covey, who pointed out that the medical marijuana clinics would already be covered by existing ordinances. Nor were they likely to be profitable, given the detailed and often self-contradictory regulations inflicted on them under the Michigan Medical Marijuana Act (MMMA), which voters approved by referendum in 2008.

On August 25, the Ferndale City Council lifted the moratorium. On the very next day, the local counter-narcotics Gestapo staged a paramilitary raid against several locations in Oakland County, arresting 15 people, confiscating cash and crops, illegally seizing medical records, and terrorizing unarmed, helpless people who suffer from cancer and other painful afflictions. Most importantly, of course, the raiders got a potent fix of their preferred narcotic -- the depraved thrill that comes from making powerless people submit to their whims.

It's hardly an exaggeration to characterize the Oakland County Narcotics Enforcement Team (NET) as the local "Gestapo." Agro  used that term to describe the ski mask-clad marauders who laid waste to his home, ripping apart furniture, throwing potting soil into the carpets and -- of course -- helping themselves to whatever cash they could find.

A similar home invasion robbery was carried out at the Lake Orion home of Agro's daughter-in-law. "She's approximately five-foot, weighs about eighty-nine pounds, and the masked officers put a shotgun in her face and told her to freeze," a wearily disgusted Agro recalled to a local reporter.

After learning about the raid, Agro went back to his house, which was swarming with armed tax-feeders.

"I asked what was going on, and they said, `Your house is being searched,'" Agro related. "I said, `Do you have a search warrant?' They said, `Yes.' I said, `Can I see it?' They said, `When we get ready to show it to you.'" Despite the fact that the invaders had a note from a judge supposedly authorizing them to trash Agro's home, the raid was, as the victim pointed out, an act of "illegal search and seizure," since the money and property that were stolen had nothing to do with a criminal act.

The same lawless behavior was on display at another facility called Everyone’s Café, where police threw cancer patients to the ground and held them at gunpoint. 

"What took place in Oakland is nothing short of armed robbery," protests Gersh Avery, a local medical marijuana activist. "Patients in those locations had nothing to do with the day-to-day operations, yet their medicine was forcibly taken from them." The NET, Avery concludes, "deliberately targeted sick innocent people."

The official sadism continued after the case was split into two groups of defendants. Judge Richard Kuhn of Michigan's 51st District Court in Waterford refused to waive a bond condition permitting the use of medical marijuana by defendants who had received medical authorization to do so. Astoundingly, 43rd District Judge Joe Longo, who is presiding over the case in Ferndale, permitted defendants with medical marijuana cards to continue using the palliative while out on bail. This, of course, begs the question of why those people are criminal defendants in the first place.

Oakland County Sheriff Mike Bouchard claims that the raid followed "undercover"  investigations of Clinical Relief and Everyone's Cafe. William Joseph Teichman, co-owner of Everyone's Cafe, insists that "We check the identification of every patient we deal with, and those undercover cops had either proper ID and paperwork or forgeries so good we couldn't tell the difference."

"I said `Hardhat'!"

In a post-raid press conference, Sheriff Bouchard -- grasping for a suitable soundbite -- described the local medical marijuana market as "something out of a bad Cheech and Chong Movie," without elaborating as to whether he considers "Up in Smoke" or "Nice Dreams" to be the gold standard of the stoner duo's cinematic output.

Bouchard himself essays a pretty decent impression of Sgt. Stedenko, the bullying, authoritarian narcotics officer who was a recurring nemesis in the comedy team's films.

Ryan Richmond, co-owner of Clinical Relief and one of the defendants in the Ferndale case, asserts that Bouchard "simply doesn't like the [Michigan state medical marijuana] law because it's too broad. If Bouchard has his way, we, you, have no rights even within the law."

Bouchard's critics are not limited to those he has arrested on marijuana-related charges.

"I personally don't understand why the county would use such a large amount of precious law enforcement resources on something like this," objects Ferndale Mayor Craig Covey. "This was obviously a political move by the sheriff to flex his muscles and send a message that he does not want medical marijuana clinics in Oakland County."

Covey also criticized "the use of SWAT teams with masked and armed officers ordering sick, elderly patients to the ground.... Now it's going to cost the taxpayers and the business owners hundreds of thousands of dollars in attorney fees to sort through this mess."

Bouchard's admitted purpose in staging the raids was not to enforce the existing law, but rather to create a "test case" intended to change it, either in substance or in application.  By strict definition, this was an exercise of violence against the helpless intended to bring about political change -- that is, an act of official terrorism.

Although Bouchard accuses medical marijuana advocates and providers of engaging in "organized crime," that description makes a much better fit when applied to the NET, which is a federally designated multi-agency task force.  Thanks to an indulgence granted by the so-called Department of Justice, the NET has a license to steal in the name of "asset forfeiture."

According to the Madison Heights Police Department's 2009 Annual Report, last year the NET seized a little more than a ton of marijuana and pilfered nearly $2 million through asset forfeiture. The August 26 raids pulled down tens of thousands of dollars in cash, including money the late Sal Agro and his wife Barbara had put aside toward the purchase of a new car.

Bouchard and Oakland County Prosecutor Jessica Cooper insist that the MMMA is dangerously ambiguous because it supposedly encourages people to flout the state's existing laws criminalizing the use and sale of marijuana for recreational purposes. They are correct in saying that the law is a masterpiece of self-contradiction, but emphatically wrong about the nature of the resulting danger: The risk of smoking weed without government permission is much less acute than that posed by power-intoxicated armed bureaucrats willing to carry out illegal paramilitary raids that target non-violent, chronically ill "offenders."

A concurring opinion by Judge P.J. O'Connell in a recent Michigan Court of Appeals case points out that "The MMMA does not codify a right to use marijuana; it merely provides a procedure through which seriously ill individuals using marijuana for its palliative effects can be identified and protected from prosecution under state law." It creates a narrow "affirmative defense to prosecutions under the Public Health Code, allowing an individual to use marijuana by freeing him or her from the threat of arrest and prosecution if that user meets all the requirements of the MMMA, while permitting prosecution under the Public Health Code if the individual fails to meet any of the requirements set forth under the MMMA."


The MMMA, furthermore, does not change the status of marijuana under state law, which lists the demonstrably harmless cannabinoid as a "Schedule 1" controlled substance" that has "no accepted medical use." What this means, in practice, is that anyone who uses or provides medical marijuana in strict fidelity of the terms and conditions dictated by the MMMA is still presumptively a criminal suspect.

Because of the incurable self-contradictions of the MMMA, Judge O'Connell warns, conscientious people who obey its provisions and seek marijuana for palliative care could still "lose both their property and their liberty" -- or even as the needless, government-inflicted death of Sal Agro demonstrates, their lives.

My earnest thanks to everyone who is helping to keep Pro Libertate on-line!

Be sure to join me each Saturday evening from 8:00-11:00 Mountain Time for Pro Libertate Radio on the Liberty News Radio Network.







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Support Your Local Army of Occupation

Boys and their toys: Members of the Malheur County (Oregon) SWAT team out having "fun."

"Wouldn't it be great if it were like this all the time?" commented a pleasant middle-aged gentleman as the two of us contemplated the large gathering of armed men in camouflage who had materialized in Payette's Centennial Park. "I feel really secure with these guys around."

"Actually, I'd feel much more secure if the guns were in the hands of people who aren't government employees," I replied, prompting a puzzled look from my new acquaintance.
 
Centennial Park is located just inside the Snake River boundary separating Idaho from Oregon. For reasons I've yet to learn, every time I visit the park to do calisthenics and sprints -- regardless of the hour of day -- I'll receive a visit from at least one police officer, who will typically do a very slow pass by my little exercise area while I'm huffing and sweating. 

On this particular afternoon, however, the park was literally swarming with camouflage-clad "police" from the Malheur County Sheriff's Department Emergency Response Team, in the company of at least one Payette County officer. They  arrived in a caravan of more than a half-dozen vehicles, one of which was pulling a trailer carrying a large motorboat. 

"Are you guys doing a training exercise?" I inquired of one fellow as he unpacked what appeared to be an AR-15.

"We're just playin,'" he replied with a perfunctory smile.

That response was quite similar to the description offered by SWAT team member Michael Hale of a training exercise conducted just a few weeks earlier just outside of Vale, Oregon.

"This is fun," the second-year officer told the Argus Observer. "This is what I did in the military. I get to shoot guns and play in the dirt. It is what I did as a kid. I just get paid for it now." 


Although the Malheur County SWAT team did play a backup role at a police roadblock during a recent carjacking episode, they spend most of their time arresting marijuana plants. On two occasions last summer, SWAT operators -- armed with assault rifles and with support from a helicopter crew -- were deployed to barren locations in rural Oregon to clear out marijuana grows, thereby doing their part in the federal government's "drug lord" price support program.

Malheur County's gorgeous Leslie Gulch.

An August 29 SWAT raid on an abandoned marijuana grow near Gold Creek harvested some 1,000 forlorn, dessicated plants, "It was not a very big garden," commented Malheur County Undersheriff Brian Wolfe (who, as it happens, was in Boy Scout Troop 453 with me as a youngster). "A lot of the plants had already died out," Wolfe explained, emphasizing that the operation was a success because the plants that had been seized wouldn't end up "on the streets."


Why was the involvement of a SWAT team "necessary" here? Wolfe insisted that this was necessary for "public safety," since hunters and campers occasionally stumble across marijuana farmers, some of whom "have been found with multiple firearms in the past." 

I'm not confident that "public safety" is enhanced by this use of paramilitary operators. "Officer safety," on the other hand, probably is. During the August 29 operation the SWAT team advanced under cover of pre-dawn darkness. In such situations it's important to exploit every advantage, marijuana plants being notoriously violent when cornered. 

This odd and pointless exercise in rural landscaping became a federally subsidized, multi-state enforcement action when agents of the Bureau of Land Management (yes, those folks are armed as well) arrested a couple of people in Idaho "in connection with" the abandoned marijuana garden.


Malheur County is a huge and beautiful swath of territory in eastern Oregon that runs parallel to western Idaho all the way to the Nevada border. Vale, the tiny town that serves as the county seat, is located along the Oregon Trail and attracts many tourists eager to yank trout from nearby Bully Creek Reservoir or snag a few pheasants. Neighboring Nyssa proudly calls itself the "Thunderegg Capital of the World," a reference to the volcanic geode that serves as Oregon's state rock. Another product of the region's turbulent geologic past is the Malheur Butte, an extinct volcano that presides over the western section of the county like a brooding ursine sentinel.

When Daryl Gates created the first SWAT team in 1968, its advertised purpose was to deal with hostage situations, bank robberies, insurrectionary urban crime, and other high-risk incidents.

Enigmatic landmark: Oregon's Malheur Butte.

Malheur County, Oregon (pop. circa 31,000) is possibly the last place in the country where a SWAT team is needed -- apart from the role it plays in federally subsidized counter-narcotics operations. 

The same is true of Payette County, Idaho, which is located on the eastern side of the Snake River and forms part of the bi-state Treasure Valley. Yet federal seed money is being spent to build SWAT teams in both of these thinly populated rural counties as part of the "war on terror."


The Department of Homeland Security, working through Idaho State University and a quasi-private entity called the Government Training Institute (GTI), recently completed the first national training course intended to develop "type III" SWAT teams. The 16-day training program, which the Idaho Statesman reports was "conducted inside an old airplane hangar in Eagle near Old Horseshoe Bend Road," drew SWAT trainees from across the country to be trained in military tactics by Special Forces operators.  


"The next time a terrorist act happens, it's not going to be [a matter of] flying airplanes into a building, it's going to be something locally," insists Detective Pat Weber from the Payette County Sheriff's Office. Weber is "looking forward to getting the rest of his team trained and categorized," continues the Statesman. "That way Payette can join Malheur County's SWAT team or any other" the unlikely event that the Islamo-Fascists turn their attention to the strategically crucial Treasure Valley. The joint exercise at Centennial Park appeared to be a prelude to inter-agency cooperation of that kind.


According to the Statesman, "the course is something every SWAT team member [in the country] will eventually graduate from -- that is if they want to keep their federal funding." In fact, the training is paid for through Homeland Security grants to local police departments. So the Feds are subsidizing the same training they require SWAT teams to have in order to qualify for even more federal subsidies.

The Homeland Security Department's decision to use Boise as a training site for national SWAT training makes an interesting counterpoint to the Idaho state government's high-profile and low-content posturing about "states' rights." But let it not be forgotten that this is a national program intended to bring all SWAT teams firmly under federal control. As the GTI's Type III Swat Operator's School Course Description points out, "The preparedness of state and local SWAT teams in the United States is one of the major initiatives of the Department of Homeland Security."





Of course, the question is, or should be: "Preparedness" for what? The Treasure Valley isn't likely to experience a tsunami of violent crime, or find itself under siege by Muslim sleeper cells. But there is a growing possibility of organized resistance to enforcement of federal "laws" regarding health care, land use, and taxation. In the event such resistance coalesces, Washington would sure find it helpful to have some federally trained paramilitary cadres in place.
 
All of this offers one small but significant illustration of the fact that your "local" police can be described as such only in purely geographical terms. It's also a reminder that the Homeland Security Regime is quietly building an army of occupation in even the smallest and most placid communities.

A quick note

I'm sorry it's been so long between updates. I've once again been waylaid by computer problems -- terminal, in the case of  my dearly departed desktop. 


Thanks so much for helping keep Pro Libertate in business!

Be sure to tune in for Pro Libertate Radio each Saturday night from 8:00-11:00 Mountain Time on the Liberty News Radio Network.












Dum spiro, pugno!