Archive for the ‘Judicial’ Category
It has been some time since I decided to write an article. There are reasons for that, but suffice it to say that my enthusiasm for restoring the republic to its original design, or should I say hope of those who sacrificed to create this great experiment is waning.
In order to fight a successful battle you must first recognize your goal. In the case of our very own revolution it was to separate from Great Britain, create a nation free from persecution, and allow the common man his right to freedom, and prosperity.
Those ideas began to erode almost immediately as ‘special interests’ lied, schemed, and conjured methods of destroying the Republic. Most notably was, and still to this day is the legal profession that encompasses the entire justice system including the private sector. Thousands of lawyers that swear an oath to disavow the Constitution, and lay homage to the black robe administrators who see themselves as gods have destroyed our common law.
What has the legal profession done? First and foremost it has created a complete misunderstanding of the rule of law in this country. We, you and I, are sovereign citizens. A sovereign is not subject to the law as it is the creator of the law. It sounds simple, but what does it mean?
The state, which can only operate by the actions of the people, is an abstract creation without rights, and without powers other than what we the people enumerate. The state cannot make rules, and regulations that impose a liability upon the citizen to which the citizen has no obligation. “There is no position which depends on clearer principles, than that every act of a delegated authority, contrary to the tenor of the commission under which it is exercised, is void. No legislative act, therefore, contrary to the Constitution, can be valid. To deny this, would be to affirm, that the deputy is greater than his principal; that the servant is above his master; that the representatives of the people are superior to the people themselves; that men acting by virtue of powers, may do not only what their powers do not authorize, but what they forbid.” – Federalist 78, Alexander Hamilton
Hamilton, along with John Jay, and James Madison go on to explain the purpose of a government designed with enumerated powers, and separations in order to prevent the destruction of original intent. This seems so obvious to me, but has been lost on the American public.
The Constitution, as the fundamental doctrine of law, is a limitation placed upon the government. The construction of the Bill of Rights reinforces this as it begins by stating “Congress shall make no law…,” and ends by declaring “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
It does not say that from time to time the judiciary may interpret the Constitution to mean something other than what it says, nor does it say that the States, which created the union, may run off in directions that infringe upon the inalienable rights of its own citizens, or that of another state. It logically follows that since the states created the union with a limited form of government that they would adhere to the principles for themselves and protect the citizen from any and all abuses. Our government was formed by men, and is beholding to man for the limited and temporary powers we might at some time recall.
In order to fight the battle, and it is most certainly a struggle, to maintain a free state we must be aware at all times that those who seek the office of government more than likely do so because they seek power. If it were otherwise, there would not be legislators who spend their entire lives plotting their next re-election campaign rather than standing their ground and voting against those acts to which the government has no authority to impose upon the constituent.
I received an e-mail not to long ago, from the Second Amendment Foundation, asking for donations to fight against ACORN's interference in Jersey City, New Jersey on the issue of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.
ACORN, as you may know, is a virulent enterprise that works diligently to move this nation to the ultimate end of a totalitarian state. Let’s not debate the issue here, because if we must then we are certainly well on our way to ACORN’s, and many other similar organizations goal.
It is clear as the nose on your face, as the saying goes, for some, but the majority is blinded with so much rhetoric from the major media that they barely have time to watch their reality TV shows, let alone read and learn about the factual nature of gun control.
We are in a true fight for liberty. Some may take to the pen, but it becomes more certain by the day that while the government takes to the sword, we will sit on our couches waiting for the knock on the door by some government agents who will bring us to a FEMA internment camp.
At one time I contributed thousands to the effort to fight gun control. I gave to the NRA every time they asked, and I was a plank-holder of the American Eagles. Now I give nothing. I give nothing because when you are fighting the battle 100 miles from the battlefield there is no point in expending ammunition.
I will continue to take the stance of penning my fight, and ignoring the calls for contributions until the pro-gun community learns to fight the fight according to the rule of law. That law starts in the Constitution at Article 1, Section 8, Clause 15&16, and culminates in the Second Amendment.
The Second Amendment has a specific meaning in conjunction with maintaining a free state, which it proudly announces, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep ...
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I have become an avid reader of Mr. Grigg’s column on the Lew Rockwell site. I recently wrote to Mr. Grigg because I particularly enjoyed this column, and I asked for permission to post it here. http://www.lewrockwell.com/grigg/grigg-w148.html
As a note here, Mr. Grigg uses the original quote from the 12th Century Crusade that gave us “Kill them all. Let God sort them out.”
by William Norman Grigg
Recently by William Norman Grigg: The Death of Aiyana Jones: 'Showtime Syndrome' Claims a Child
Kevin Weeks was a career criminal employed as a Mob hit man, but even he possessed sufficient good judgment and self-restraint to avoid risking the life of a seven-year-old girl.
In Brutal, his aptly titled memoir of the years he spent working for Boston Mob boss – and protected FBI asset – James "Whitey" Bulger, Weeks describes how he was given an order to assassinate Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr, who relentlessly tormented Bulger in print. Weeks set up a sniper nest near Carr's home. He had the target set up for the kill, but didn't pull the trigger because Carr's daughter, "a little girl, like seven-years-old or so," was walking hand-in-hand with her father.
"I couldn't take a chance of the bullet fragmenting and ricocheting or hitting her or just killing her father in front of her," recounts Weeks.
This episode, admittedly, is retold from the self-serving perspective of a convicted murderer. Ironically, Carr himself, in his valuable book The Brothers Bulger, relates a somewhat similar story of a proposed contract hit that was vetoed by former Boston Mob boss Raymond Patriarca.
Joe Barboza, a hitman employed by Patriarca, pointed out that the hoodlum targeted by the contract lived in a three-story house in Boston. Barboza suggested that he could "break into the basement and pour gasoline all around and torch the place, after which I either get him with the smoke inhalation or I pick him off when he's climbing out the window."
"Barboza had worked out a plan for every contingency," notes Carr. "He would bring three shooters with him, to watch each side of the house. They would cut the telephone lines to the houses, so that the victim couldn't call the fire department. And just in case one of the neighbors called, before setting the house on fire Barboza planned to phone in false alarms across the city to tie up every fire company."
Patriarca, who had few compunctions about killing when it suited him, wasn't keen on Barboza's plan, in large measure because of the potential harm to non-combatants.
"Patriarca asked Barboza if anyone else lived in [the targeted hoodlum's] house, and Barboza mentioned the victim's mother," continues Carr.
"You're gonna kill his mother too?" asked Patriarca.
"It ain't my fault she lives there," the hit man snorted by way of reply.
"Patriarca canceled the contract," Carr tersely summarizes. Barboza, not surprisingly, proved to be too ruthless and deranged for the Mob, and ended up – like Bulger – as another of the FBI's protected assets.
It is a monumental pity that the Detroit Special Response Team, or the decision-makers above them in the Detroit PD, didn't have the sense of proportionality displayed by Mob figures like Kevin Weeks and Raymond Patriarca. If they had, the murder suspect they sought – 34-year-old Chauncey Owens – could have been taken into custody without the midnight paramilitary raid that resulted in the burning and shooting death of seven-year-old Aiyana Jones.
Shortly after midnight on May 16, while Aiyana – a radiant little girl who might have grown up to resemble Zoe Saldana – was sleeping on the downstairs living room sofa where she would be killed just a few minutes later, the raid team gathered for a "safety briefing."
As described by police sources to the Detroit Free Press, that briefing dealt entirely with considerations of "officer safety," which – as any honest observer will admit – is the highest and most important consideration in any law enforcement operation.
The raid team "was told there was information that the suspect might be armed, possibly with an assault rifle and a handgun," reports the Free Press. "Someone said there also might be dangerous dogs and that the house was believed to be a possible dope den."
Another intelligence source speculated that the unprepossessing duplex might actually be the location of the missing Iraqi WMDs, which had been stored in a basement vault guarded by a basilisk.
No, not really.
But in its anxiety over officer safety, and its eagerness to stage a properly impressive raid for the benefit of the embedded A&E camera crew, the SRT did not take into account "the possibility of any children being present," despite the fact that the front yard was littered with toys – a clue that even a police officer should be able to recognize – and warnings to that effect offered by neighbors as the raid unfolded.
Street officers and homicide detectives were already on the scene when the SRT's armored personnel carrier rolled up in front of the duplex.
The APC was driven by Officer Joseph Weekley, who was also the first through the door after a flash-bang grenade had been thrown through the window. Weekley went barreling into the living room armed with a machine gun and protected by a ballistic shield.
Meanwhile, Aiyana – according to at least one eyewitness – was being severely burned by the incendiary grenade that had been thrown into her bed.
It's not clear whether Aiyana suffered her fatal gunshot wound before or after Weekley entered the house. In either case, Officer Weekley has been identified as the shooter. He initially claimed that his gun accidentally went off during a "scuffle" with Aiyana's 47-year-old grandmother.
Within a few hours that account was "clarified" by the police, who said that there was incidental "contact" between Weekley and Aiyana's grandmother; the latter denies having contact of any kind with Weekley.
Geoffrey Fieger, the attorney representing Aiyana's family, claims to have seen a videotape of the raid showing that the shot was fired into the house shortly after the grenade was hurled through the downstairs window.
Chauncey Owens, who has been charged ...
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By Jim Douglass
According to a Memphis jury’s verdict on December 8,1999, in the wrongful death lawsuit of the King family versus Loyd Jowers "and other unknown co-conspirators," Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a conspiracy that included agencies of his own government. Almost 32 years after King’s murder at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968, a court extended the circle of responsibility for the assassination beyond the late scapegoat James Earl Ray to the United States government.
I can hardly believe the fact that, apart from the courtroom participants, only Memphis TV reporter Wendell Stacy and I attended from beginning to end this historic three-and-one-half week trial. Because of journalistic neglect scarcely anyone else in this land of ours even knows what went on in it. After critical testimony was given in the trial’s second week before an almost empty gallery, Barbara Reis, U.S. correspondent for the Lisbon daily Publico who was there several days, turned to me and said, "Everything in the U.S. is the trial of the century. O.J. Simpson’s trial was the trial of the century. Clinton’s trial was the trial of the century. But this is the trial of the century, and who’s here?"
What I experienced in that courtroom ranged from inspiration at the courage of the Kings, their lawyer-investigator William F. Pepper, and the witnesses, to amazement at the government’s carefully interwoven plot to kill Dr. King. The seriousness with which U.S. intelligence agencies planned the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. speaks eloquently of the threat Kingian nonviolence represented to the powers that be in the spring of 1968.
In the complaint filed by the King family, "King versus Jowers and Other Unknown Co-Conspirators," the only named defendant, Loyd Jowers, was never their primary concern. As soon became evident in court, the real defendants were the anonymous co-conspirators who stood in the shadows behind Jowers, the former owner of a Memphis bar and grill. The Kings and Pepper were in effect charging U.S. intelligence agencies — particularly the FBI and Army intelligence — with organizing, subcontracting, and covering up the assassination. Such a charge guarantees almost insuperable obstacles to its being argued in a court within the United States. Judicially it is an unwelcome beast.
Many qualifiers have been attached to the verdict in the King case. It came not in criminal court but in civil court, where the standards of evidence are much lower than in criminal court. (For example, the plaintiffs used unsworn testimony made on audiotapes and videotapes.) Furthermore, the King family as plaintiffs and Jowers as defendant agreed ahead of time on much of the evidence.
But these observations are not entirely to the point. Because of the government’s "sovereign immunity," it is not possible to put a U.S. intelligence agency in the dock of a U.S. criminal court. Such a step would require authorization by the federal government, which is not likely to indict itself. Thanks to the conjunction of a civil court, an independent judge with a sense of history, and a courageous family and lawyer, a spiritual breakthrough to an unspeakable truth occurred in Memphis. It allowed at least a few people (and hopefully many more through them) to see the forces behind King’s martyrdom and to feel the responsibility we all share for it through our government. In the end, twelve jurors, six black and six white, said to everyone willing to hear: guilty as charged.
We can also thank the unlikely figure of Loyd Jowers for providing a way into that truth.
Loyd Jowers: When the frail, 73-year-old Jowers became ill after three days in court, Judge Swearengen excused him. Jowers did not testify and said through his attorney, Lewis Garrison, that he would plead the Fifth Amendment if subpoenaed. His discretion was too late. In 1993 against the advice of Garrison, Jowers had gone public. Prompted by William Pepper’s progress as James Earl Ray’s attorney in uncovering Jowers’s role in the assassination, Jowers told his story to Sam Donaldson on Prime Time Live. He said he had been asked to help in the murder of King and was told there would be a decoy (Ray) in the plot. He was also told that the police "wouldn’t be there that night."
In that interview, the transcript of which was read to the jury in the Memphis courtroom, Jowers said the man who asked him to help in the murder was a Mafia-connected produce dealer named Frank Liberto. Liberto, now deceased, had a courier deliver $l00,000 for Jowers to hold at his restaurant, Jim’s Grill, the back door of which opened onto the dense bushes across from the Lorraine Motel. Jowers said he was visited the day before the murder by a man named Raul, who brought a rifle in a box.
As Mike Vinson reported in the March-April Probe, other witnesses testified to their knowledge of Liberto’s involvement in King’s slaying. Store-owner John McFerren said he arrived around 5:l5 pm, April 4, 1968, for a produce pick-up at Frank Liberto’s warehouse in Memphis. (King would be shot at 6:0l pm.) When he approached the warehouse office, McFerren overheard Liberto on the phone inside saying, "Shoot the son-of-a-bitch on the balcony."
Café-owner Lavada Addison, a friend of Liberto’s in the late 1970’s, testified that Liberto had told her he "had Martin Luther King killed." Addison’s son, Nathan Whitlock, said when he learned of this conversation he asked Liberto point-blank if he had killed King.
"[Liberto] said, ‘I didn’t kill the nigger but I had it done.’ I said, ‘What about that other son-of-a-bitch taking credit for it?’ He says, ‘Ahh, he wasn’t nothing but a troublemaker from Missouri. He was a front man…a setup man.’"
The jury also heard a tape recording of a two-hour-long confession Jowers made at a fall 1998 meeting with Martin Luther King’s son Dexter and former UN Ambassador Andrew Young. On the tape Jowers says that meetings to plan the assassination occurred at Jim’s Grill. He said the planners included undercover Memphis Police Department officer Marrell McCollough ...
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Listen my children and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.
Some may know the relevance of the 19th of April from the words of Henry Wadsworth Longefellow as he immortalized the beginning of the Revolution with the poetic tale of one of America's Minute Men.
The Militia at Lexington, Massachusetts mustered some fifty to sixty men in response to the alert, and to show their displeasure with the conduct of the Crown, and his rule.
Captain Parker, a pastor, told the men of the Militia, "Stand your ground. Don't fire unless fired upon. But if they mean to have a war, let it begin here." Eight brave men of the Organized Militia died on that day. They were not members of a National Guard, or some other pretend unit that the courts would refer to in order to limit the ability of the People to arm themselves so that they might have the resources to block a tyrannical state.
Yes, whether you believe it or not, the reason behind the Militia was to protect against not only lawlessness, but also an abusive government. And whether you believe it or not, we long ago proved that this government should have been torn apart, and reconstructed in its intended image.
For those who reason otherwise, I suggest you go to the local law library, and examine the length of the United States Code. Thousands of statutes, whose interpretations are periodically changed by un-elected officials, and judicial proclamations that are designed, with the intent, to keep the citizen off guard, and constantly struggling to survive the machinations of the legal system. There has to be a buffer, some apparatus that allows the People to fight back when words, and procedures fail.
In Federalist 29, Alexander Hamilton wrote, "There is something so far-fetched and so extravagant in the idea of danger to liberty from the militia, that one is at a loss whether to treat it with gravity or with raillery; whether to consider it as a mere trial of skill, like the paradoxes of rhetoricians; as a disingenuous artifice to instil prejudices at any price; or as the serious offspring of political fanaticism. Where in the name of common-sense, are our fears to end if we may not trust our sons, our brothers, our neighbors, our fellow-citizens? What shadow of danger can there be from men who are daily mingling with the rest of their countrymen and who participate with them in the same feelings, sentiments, habits and interests? What reasonable cause of apprehension can be inferred from a power in the Union to prescribe regulations for the militia, and to command its services when necessary, while the particular States are to have the sole and exclusive appointment of the officers? If it were possible seriously to indulge a jealousy of the militia upon any conceivable establishment under the federal government, the circumstance of the officers being in the appointment of the States ought at once to extinguish it. There can be no doubt that this circumstance will always secure to them a preponderating influence over the militia."
We are engaged in a great war for the minds of the people of this nation. On the one hand there are those in government, subversive groups such as The Brady Campaign to prevent gun violence, its allies in the media, and national corporations who work tirelessly in order that they might wrest power from the People. On the other there are the wary who see what conspiracies have been laid to promote such an agenda. It is to the benefit of the former group to deceive the witless tools so that their ignorance might be used to trivialize those who dissent.
The agenda to make the people toothless began when the federal government destroyed the military arm of the People, and created the National Guard, whose officers are not appointed by the states, and therefore do not meet constitutional muster.
Then slowly, but surely, the media began to demonize the word militia so that the simple minded who are seduced by the power of the press believe that the rightful organization is some sort of racist clan, and now, as recently labeled, a terrorist threat. As Hamilton noted, "a disingenuous artifice to instil prejudices at any price..."
How simple is it to read, and understand the words of our Founding Fathers. They were posted in the press of the day, are immortalized in our originating documents, and prolific in the diaries and journals of the men, and women who founded this great nation. It seems that we are unwilling to admit that the so-called experts are nothing but spin masters for the powers that be. Talking heads, as the current term details, for promoting the will of those whose only task appears to be the fall of freedom.
Now the current president has nominated one Sonia Sotomayor for the High Court, to conspire with the other rabid anti-constitution players he has gathered around him. Sotomayor has stated that the Second Amendment does not apply to the states. Let's examine the logic behind that opinion.
The Constitution was written as a document to outline the setup of the government, how it was to function, and what powers it was granted by the People. There are words in the document that worried men such as Patrick Henry who understood the nature of power, and how it seeks to pervert so that it may garner more power. The phrase 'general welfare' was of particular concern since it might easily be manipulated to create authority nowhere listed in the Constitution.
The Thirteen Colonies had just ended a long and costly war to throw off the yoke of a monarch. There was fear, and rightfully so, that a strong central government would emerge, and begin to draw all power to the core of those within its structure. The states demanded a clarification of liberty, and so the Bill of ...
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