This article is reprinted with the permission of Becky, and the generous FREEMAN. Please visit the site if you are concerned with the course of the nation.

by Becky Akers

Boston lies under a foot of snow this Monday March evening in 1770, so icy and cold that anyone who can huddle at home on the hearth should. Instead, much of the town is abroad and abuzz like an angry hive. Bostonians are infuriated at something their descendants will take for granted, indeed, will prize so highly they’ll pay for it: police are patrolling their city.

And have been for many months. In September 1768 a thousand British Redcoats disembarked at the town’s wharves. From there they “marched sword in hand through the principal streets of [Boston], then in profound peace.”¹ Their purpose was not to protect the 15,000 inhabitants but to keep them in line, much as police presently do. And, again like modern officers, they will collect money for the government, though rather than writing traffic tickets, they will enforce customs duties.

The colonists do not share their descendants’ idealism that the police “protect and serve,” nor do they mistake the Redcoats for “Boston’s Finest.” They see the soldiers stalking among them as the government’s bullyboys, and they despise them for it. Tonight, that antagonism will explode, becoming famous as a Massacre for killing five civilians and wounding others.

Historians offer a bevy of explanations and excuses for that calamitous confrontation: Americans resented the British as an occupying force; off-duty soldiers worked at odd jobs for low pay, stealing opportunities from Boston’s day laborers and provoking more resentment; the Redcoats were naturally arrogant, the colonists naturally touchy. But behind it all lies the simple fact that the soldiers were policing Boston. They marched through the city searching for contraband, infractions of the government’s rules, and anyone the administration deemed suspicious.

They also reintroduced His Majesty’s customs officers at the point of their bayonets. Prior to the Redcoats’ advent in 1768, Bostonians had so intimidated these officials that they fled the city. Ann Hulton was sister to one; she wrote, “Every officer of the Crown that does his duty is become obnoxious & they must either fly or be sacrificed. . . .” Ann flew with her brother and others to Castle Island, now part of the mainland but then a fort lying at a safe distance in Boston Harbor. From there, Miss Hulton continued her account of the colonists’ cowing of Customs: “These Sons of Violence after attacking Houses, breaking Windows, beating, Stoning & bruizing several gentlemen belong’g to the Customs, the Collector mortally & burning his boat.”² Only when the Redcoats could ensure their safety did the officers return to Boston. They remained for the next 18 months, retreating again with the troops after the Massacre: “The inhabitants of the town assembled in Faneuil Hall . . . unanimously resolved, that no armed force should be suffered longer to reside in the capital . . . . [T]he people, inflexible in their demands, insisted that not one British soldier should be left within the town . . . . [W]ithin four days the whole army decamped. . . . The commissioners of the customs and several other obnoxious characters retired with the army” to the fortified Castle Island.³

Could we whisk the army from their eighteenth-century fort to a modern precinct, the Redcoats would likely agree that their policing differed little from today’s—except in one remarkable detail. They would be astounded at the enormous authority most Americans grant the police and at the enormous respect, even glorification, following from that.

Both are centuries removed from the ridicule and revulsion red-coated police rated in eighteenth-century Boston. Perhaps the difference in attitude arises partly from our powerlessness against a force armed far beyond what most of us can manage. The Bostonians milling about the freezing streets that night carried pistols and swords every bit the equal of muskets and bayonets. If a man didn’t own a gun or blade, he hastened toward the coming showdown with the “invaders” and “foreign enemies” openly bearing a wooden stave or club, a knife, a hatchet, even a chunk of ice scooped off the street.⁴

Their weapons rendered the colonists boisterous and aggressive when standing up to the Redcoats. British General Thomas Gage reported that “The people were as Lawless and Licentious after the Troops arrived, as they were before. The Troops . . . seemed only offered to abuse and Ruin . . . to suffer ill usage and even assaults upon their Persons till their Lives were in Danger. . . .”⁵

That “lawlessness” bedeviled the Redcoats from their first moments in Boston, when they began hunting barracks. Thomas Hutchinson, Massachusetts’s royally appointed governor, offered a large public building to the soldiers, ignoring the “outcasts of the Workhouse and the scum of the Town”⁶ already renting rooms there. The “scum” objected to the governor’s exercise of eminent domain as much as Hutchinson would have had they offered the Redcoats his mansion. They promptly barricaded themselves inside the building.

Boston’s sheriff, backed by some soldiers, soon arrived. He discovered an unlocked window, climbed into the building, and ordered the “outcasts” out. They promptly barricaded him inside, too.

Meanwhile, the sheriff’s martial escort stood helpless, unable to rescue him, because the scowling, muttering townspeople surrounding the place heavily outnumbered the soldiers. This standoff continued for two days after Boston’s Council sided with the “scum” and refused to authorize their eviction.

Nor did the colonists’ “ill usage” abate over the next year and a half. Before the shooting began on the night of the Massacre a citizen scolded a group of British officers: “Why don’t you keep your soldiers in the barracks? . . . Are the inhabitants to be knocked down in the streets? Are they to be murdered in this manner? You know the country has been used ill. You know the town has been used ill. We did not send for you. We will not have you here.”⁷

Contrast that succinct and spirited lesson in liberty with the shuffling slave mentality of modern Americans. We bow and scrape when dealing with police officers in their various guises, whether the state trooper during a traffic stop or the Transportation Security Administration screener searching us without cause or warrant at the airport.

Also astonishing is the deference the Redcoats’ officers showed the colonists. Sometime after one Bostonian had scolded the officers, another asked British Captain John Preston whether he would order his men to fire on them. “By no means, by no means,” Preston answered respectfully. “My giving the word ‘fire’ under those circumstances would prove me no officer.”⁸ Thus while modern police order us about as though we are slow and stupid children, British officers requested, explained, and begged pardon.

After the Redcoats fired that night, a silversmith named Benjamin Burdick approached, obviously studying the troops in the moonlight. “I want to see some faces that I may swear to another day,” he said. Would any of us dare stop when we see a car on the side of the highway, with a trooper ticketing the driver, to announce ourselves as witnesses? Granted, Burdick was an imposing man, estimated to weigh 380 pounds by a neighbor,⁹ but even the largest among us is unlikely to heckle an armed cop. Not only do they outgun us, but there are too many laws protecting them, too much presupposition that, in any encounter, the state is right and the citizen wrong. The Redcoats in eighteenth-century Boston could rely on no such privileges. Indeed, the only response Captain Preston made to the brave Burdick was a mild, “Perhaps, sir, you may [be summoned to court as a witness].”¹⁰

Unthinkable, isn’t it? The police buffaloed, and citizens riding herd on them! But that’s become an impossible dream; it is as if the people and the police have swapped places. Why? Are Americans really that different now? Or have policemen, their nature and their relationship to the people they “serve,” changed?

William the Conqueror

Eighteenth-century Englishmen, whether in the colonies or at home, had a horror of the military’s policing them, of the government’s bringing troops against them instead of against national enemies, such as the French and the Spanish. This horror dates back centuries, to the Norman invasion of England in 1066, when an army under William the Conqueror devastated the countryside. The soldiers robbed, raped, burned, and brutalized, committing all the atrocities at which armies excel. Then, their victory secure, they added insult to injury by quartering their troops on the native Saxons. They also taxed them.

The Saxons contrasted this abuse by professional soldiers with the behavior of their own militias. Saxon farmers and shopkeepers fought to defend themselves when attacked, but they returned to their farms and shops once the danger had passed. They did not make a career of robbing people on behalf of the king, nor did they burn a man’s home and sack his shop. Militias were defensive, armies offensive: the difference keenly impressed Saxon farmers pondering plundered towns, farms in flames, and wives and daughters traumatized or even dying from rape.

This martial skepticism was reinforced during the civil wars of the 1600s, especially Oliver Cromwell’s military dictatorship. A “standing army,” with its professional killers and its existence even during peacetime, was considered the worst evil that could afflict a free people—if a people so afflicted could be called free.

By the eighteenth century this national attitude resulted in a poorly manned army of thin ranks. Add to this an abusive command relying on physical torture and low pay to control the soldiers, and it’s no wonder the British army had to resort to kidnapping to fill its brigades. It drafted almost literally out of the gutter those soldiers it didn’t take from the hangman. (Judges sometimes offered convicted murderers and other miscreants a choice between killing for the King or being killed.)

Recruits who weren’t ducking the scaffold usually came from society’s lowest rungs. Impressment officers prowled the streets of London, promising the naked, starving underclass a warm uniform and regular rations. When these blandishments failed, the officer tried to get his victim so drunk he would grasp a shilling: astoundingly, the government considered that pittance a fair exchange for a man’s life. You might think it easy to slip a coin into a poor man’s hand, especially one plied with free booze all night. But however brutal life on the streets was, everyone knew the army was worse. Nor was there any escape: once a soldier, always a soldier. It took death to free a man from his “deal” with the King.

Citizens feared the army drawn from such ranks much as we would a mob from our slums and penitentiaries. Perhaps a beggar or prisoner with the soul of a poet was recruited now and then, but if so, he was rapidly desensitized once he donned his uniform. Discipline was draconian, merciless, excessive, terrifying—we can exhaust the thesaurus and still not come close to describing the torture regularly inflicted on the poor cuss turned soldier or sailor. The most minor of transgressions earned horrific retribution, with flogging the favored punishment. These whippings consisted of hundreds of lashes and sometimes a thousand; they were so savage they could kill or, at the least, cripple the victim for life. Often the lashes were administered in sets over the course of several weeks or a month: this allowed the muscles (little skin would be left after the first strokes from the cat-o’-nine-tails) of the back to begin healing before they were once again ripped open. When the brutality finally ended and the victim’s wrists were loosed from the crossed halberds, a bucket of salt water was dashed across him—a crude and unspeakably cruel antiseptic.

Men abused so horrifically were unlikely to show mercy, kindness, or empathy to the civilians who crossed their paths. Governor Hutchinson described those in one of the two regiments loosed on Boston: “They are in general such bad fellows in that regement [sic] that it seems impossible to restrain them.”¹¹ An unbridgeable gap yawned between “citizen” and “soldier,” and though these men might protect England from France’s vengeance, most Englishmen felt little gratitude for this “service.” Britain engaged in many of the trade restrictions that our government does, spawning a century’s worth of war. This benefited the same politicians, bureaucrats, and manufacturers of armaments that current wars do. Everyone else realized the army guarded the interests of these groups at his expense—literally. Nor did people swallow any line about the troops’ “protecting” their liberty: these same soldiers also quelled civilians who rioted in protest of the government’s policies.

In some ways, using soldiers may have been friendlier to freedom than a dedicated police force. Sending troops against a citizenry that feared the army kept folks continually on their guard against them. Anyone who tried to portray these armed aliens as allies, in league with honest citizens to defend society from the bad guys, would have been dismissed as a fool.

Robert Peel

Then along came Robert Peel, MP, creator of England’s first police force.

Born in 1788, Peel joined Parliament as a Tory in 1809. His career there hopscotched between the party line and independence. This allows admirers to portray him as principled, while those who understand political power consider him adept at manipulating it. In 1812, as chief secretary for Ireland, he instituted the “Peace Preservation Police.” Ireland foamed then as now with religious-cum-political conflicts, so “peace preservation” translated to quashing resistance to the decrees of King and Parliament.

Peel’s police quashed so successfully that he was appointed home secretary in 1822. This was a troubled decade in England; four years later, a depression crippled the country. Predictably, crime and rioting increased with unemployment, especially in the cities. But, again predictably, this did not sway government to end the mercantilism causing the depression. Instead, as would any astute politician already famous for “solving” a similar problem, Peel called for a committee to investigate the possibilities of a police force in London.

Unfortunately for Peel, the committee wasn’t as astute as he. The first time around it reported that police were by their nature inimical to a free society. Peel sent them back to the drawing board for a more acceptable answer. Not surprisingly, the committee then recommended that the government should act. Specifically, it should organize and augment London’s existing officers.

There were about 450 of these, ranging from magistrates’ “runners” to Marine Police patrolling the Thames for contraband and untaxed goods. Peel consolidated these agents, hired enough new men to bring his number to 1,000, trained them, and put them in uniform as well as on the public’s purse.

Peel also codified nine principles for his police. These ranged from a mission statement (the purpose of the “peelers” or “bobbies,” as they were called in Peel’s honor, was to prevent crime and keep the peace) to the practical tip of securing the public’s cooperation through impartiality and courtesy. But one of Peel’s Principles struck liberty a blistering blow. For the first time, instead of the state’s agents being hurtful and alien, a force snatched from prison and poverty and turned loose on the public by a vengeful king, the bobbies were instead to pose as friends and neighbors. “The police,” Peel insisted, “are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interest of community welfare and existence.”¹²

The new bureaucracy, complete with two commissioners, was up and running by 1829. Given London’s crime wave, it seems reasonable to assume that law-abiding folk welcomed these guardians. Instead, they despised them. Nor did they cooperate with them. They called the bobbies by names far more Anglo-Saxon, sometimes assaulted them, and occasionally killed them. A jury even returned a verdict of “justifiable homicide” for a civilian charged with murdering one.

But just as a man gets used to hanging, so Londoners did to bobbies. Their hostility faded with time. Actually, the public’s feelings about these “members . . . paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen” probably little mattered when it came to continuing the bobbies’ patrols: an ostensibly free country now had an unanswerable excuse—protecting citizens from nongovernmental criminals—for infiltrating and monitoring the population. It would hardly relinquish this immense advantage without prolonged, mass rebellion.

Other governments eagerly watched Britain’s experiment with the intent of copying it. The first American city to do so was New York, in 1853. We might hope that a country founded in freedom would resist paying some citizens to enforce the state’s whims against others. Instead, Philadelphia boasted a force by 1856 and Boston by 1859, despite its rioting just 90 years before against red-coated police. Perhaps the blue coats lulled suspicion.

Preventing Crime

Americans heard the same excuses for the state’s monitoring them as Londoners had—the same excuses, in fact, which prevail today: the police would keep the peace and prevent crime. Never mind that the police have a questionable record of solving, let alone preventing, crime. Typically, police departments in large cities “solve” only 55–65 percent of homicides, though that doesn’t necessarily include apprehending the culprit. Governments have long resorted to asking, even haranguing, the public for help in solving crime; many now host websites listing their failures in the hopes that citizens will ride to the rescue.¹³ And despite New York City’s phalanx of 40,000 cops—an army larger than George Washington ever commanded at one time during the Revolutionary War—17,875 cars were stolen in 2005, a “sharp drop” from previous years.¹⁴

Broken promises have never threatened the existence of police departments, however. That’s because these institutions are extremely useful to the politicians who determine their fate. With the advent of New York City’s first force, politicians rejoiced at having an entire department of voters depend on them for a raise; even more did they appreciate the management positions they could award to influential supporters. They often looked on their city’s cops as political bodyguards, akin to Caesar Augustus’s praetorian guard: during elections, cops made sure the “right” folks voted.

Civil-service rules supposedly eliminated such corruption in the late nineteenth century, but any improvements were offset by the police’s expansion into everyday life. Their consistent presence on the streets attracted the attention of anyone wanting help. Folks who might have relied on family and neighbors turned instead to the patrolman in his noticeable uniform. Police were soon chaperoning lost children, adjudicating domestic disputes, controlling traffic, and even boarding bums in their station houses. Official involvement elevated these matters, sometimes serious but often merely mundane, into crises worthy of their own bureaucracies, fertilizing the growth of municipal governments.¹⁵

In contrast to their eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century forefathers, modern Americans take police for granted, much like driver’s licenses and parking tickets. If they think about them at all, it is not as a standing army quartered among them but as heroes who serve and protect. Even the latest corruption scandal or physical abuse of a prisoner scarcely dents the apathy and mistaken perception. Those who do rail against corruption and abuse seldom question the basic premise behind policing; instead, all that’s required is weeding out the rogues, tinkering with the regulations, and reforming the department yet again.

This is especially tragic given the warped emphasis policing brings to crime. The American judicial apparatus focuses on punishing those who transgress the government’s decrees, either extracting their money for the state or imprisoning them or both. Restoring the criminal’s victim is hardly ever a consideration (perhaps because most “crimes” the state now prosecutes actually have no victims). This contrasts baldly and badly with Anglo-Saxon justice, in which making the victim whole was the sole concern.¹⁶ Neighbors mutually pledged to assist anyone who suffered loss at the hands of a thief or murderer. Once the miscreant was apprehended, the community assessed his guilt and, if satisfied, required him to make restitution. Those criminals who refused faced ostracism, leaving them vulnerable to vengeance from their victims.

Occasionally, a violator was stronger than the community on which he preyed, at which point folks might solicit the king’s help. Early Anglo-Saxon kings maintained a palace guard, though these forces were small in number because the king paid them from his own pocket. Communities began including a royal recompense, then, in the violator’s restitution. But the royal eye quickly recognized a river of revenue in that recompense. This created a perverse incentive to invent more “crimes” with large fines. Gradually, the state arrogated to itself a monopoly on “solving” crime, with its profits trumping the victim’s restitution. That left folks with little reason to report misdeeds beyond the hope that the criminal, if caught, would no longer prey on them, and they quit doing so. The state had the last laugh, though: it became a crime not to report a crime. This permeates practically all American penal codes to this day.

Obviously, government’s interest lies in persuading taxpayers that the police protect them not the state. But the priorities are obvious. How many dollars of stolen goods are returned to citizens versus how many dollars in traffic tickets go to the state?¹⁷ How many political demonstrations are “contained” by the police versus how many stolen cars are recovered? How often is a senator or governor coddled by a police escort when he descends on a town versus how many ordinary folks fear to venture down a dark alley? Indeed, New York City’s percentage of “solved” murders in 2005 plunged perhaps because so many detectives were busy protecting visiting pooh-bahs. Clearly, the state profits far more from the police than do the people.

I once watched a trial in which a policeman was suing the police force that had employed him. He had been fired a few days before he would have retired. This brought his pension in doubt, which in turn brought him into court. His attorney emphasized his client’s valor by insisting that for 20 years he had performed “paramilitary” duties with a “paramilitary” force. He consistently and repeatedly portrayed the police as “paramilitary.”

Tragically, that makes us the “para-enemy.”

Obviously we can’t depend upon the Supreme Court, which picks and chooses the cases it will hear, and then legislates from the bench.

We can no longer depend upon those we send to congress to abide their oath of office. They are just paid-off pawns in what appears to be an agenda designed to eliminate liberty.

Author, and historian Tom Woods talks about Nullification and the importance it played when forming this nation in this interview at Press TV.

As a note here, Mr. Grigg uses the original quote from the 12^th 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 with the murder of 17-year-old Je’Rean Blake, was arrested in the upstairs flat, a separate domicile from the one in which Aiyana was killed. Prior to the SRT raid, Owens had been seen on the streets near the duplex. There was no reason – well, none not dictated by the demands of Homeland Security Theater – to mount a midnight paramilitary operation to take Owens into custody.

Why wasn’t an effort made to arrest him on the streets – after staking out the duplex, if necessary? That question, of course, fails to take into account the “reality TV” camera crew. Once that factor is considered, it’s a matter of res ipsa loquitir.

A&E’s Detroit SWAT program made Joseph Weekley a television star. The May 16 raid, as some veteran police officers might put it, wasn’t Weekley’s first rodeo. Nor was this the first time his conduct put children at severe risk.

Weekley took part in a February 2007 SRT raid on a Detroit residence occupied by several children. A lawsuit filed on behalf of the family claims that the SRT gunned down two dogs “without any justifiable reason whatsoever,” and that during the operation the officers “had their guns pointed at … [a] child and [an] infant.”

In that 2007 raid Weekley and his comrades were pursuing a suspect in an armed robbery. As was the case last Sunday, the SRT wasn’t dealing with a hostage situation or a barricaded shooter, let alone a heavily armed serial killer on a rampage. None of the people terrorized by the raid and detained at gunpoint was charged in connection with the crime. At least in that earlier incident, the SRT – in what appears to be an example of unwonted restraint – declined to use a flash-bang grenade.

Paramilitary units like the Detroit SRT are used to carry out what are described as “high-risk” operations. This description is generally true – when applied to those targeted by the raids; the risks experienced by the heavily armed raiders in body armor are minuscule.

On average, between 100–150 such raids take place every day in this supposedly free country. Most of them are narcotics enforcement actions against people involved in non-violent, consensual behavior. Typically, the only “risk” confronted by law enforcement personnel in such circumstances is the possibility that if they knock on the door and present their warrant the evidence will disappear down the toilet. Under this order of priorities, the convenience of prosecutors enforcing asinine drug laws is served at the expense of those brutalized and often killed without reason in their own homes.

The decision to carry out a SRT raid was almost certainly dictated by the media ambitions of Detroit Police Chief Warren Evans, who – in the words of Detroit News columnist Charlie LeDuff – is positioning himself as a “reality TV” star.

“Television executives around the country have been shown what is known in television parlance as the ‘sizzle reel’ of Chief Evans himself, a video compilation of Detroit’s top cop trying to take back the streets,” writes LeDuff, who saw that footage several weeks ago. “It is part of a pitch for a full-blown television series.”

As Detroit’s civic and economic implosion accelerates, the city has become an irresistible setting for state-centric media outlets “peddling mayhem,” continues LeDuff. “Spike TV featured the Detroit bureau of the Drug Enforcement Administration in 2008. A&E is taping a season of ‘Parking Wars’ here; production on a series about the Fire Department wrapped late last year. Even Animal Planet is in on the deal with ‘Animal Cops Detroit.’”

Chief Evans’ “reality” show pitch begins with the uniformed bureaucrat “gripping a semi-automatic rifle, standing in front of crumbling Michigan Central Depot, staring down a camera and declaring that he’ll do whatever it takes to take his city back from crime. The camera will tag along with Warren Evans as he goes on house raids, smokes cigars with his underlings and recalls words to live by told to him by his mother.”

LeDuff’s disclosures do much to explain why the A&E camera crew went along on the SRT raid that killed Aiyana Jones, and why the Department chose to stage a midnight “Shock and Awe” operation rather than quietly bringing in the suspect.

Aiyana Jones was killed because the Detroit PD wanted to boost Chief Evans’s Q Score.

Nearly two decades ago, millions of Americans were mortified by the assault on Randy Weaver’s family in northern Idaho and the federal siege of the Branch Davidians at Mt. Carmel.

In the first atrocity, FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi proved – by gunning down a nursing mother who was cradling her infant daughter – that he wasn’t burdened with the scruples that prevented Kevin Weeks from pulling the trigger on Howie Carr.

The latter episode ended with the FBI (aided by the Delta Force) carrying out – on a much larger scale – an arson/murder plan very similar to the one proposed by Mob hit man Joe Barboza, and vetoed by Mob boss Raymond Patriarca. As Barboza proposed, the Feds pumped the Branch Davidian dwelling full of gas and, when the fire erupted, used snipers to pick off anybody attempting to flee the holocaust. They even interdicted fire and emergency crews while the victims burned and suffocated.

Waco and Ruby Ridge were anomalous only in the sense that they were large, well-publicized versions of the daily acts of state terrorism carried out by the Regime, both here and abroad. Pashtun and Tajik families terrorized by Special Forces raids in Afghanistan could profitably compare notes with survivors of SWAT raids in the United States.

Jason Moon, who served with the U.S. Army in Iraq, brought back a video in which a sergeant told his troops that “The difference between an insurgent and an Iraqi civilian is whether they are dead or alive.” For the benefit of those who fail to take that sergeant’s meaning, Moon explains: “If you kill a civilian he becomes an insurgent because you retroactively make that person a threat.”

Jason Washburn, who served three tours in Iraq, has recounted how troops were encouraged to carry “drop guns” to be deposited near newly-minted “insurgents”; eventually, this instruction was modified to permit “drop shovels,” since a solider in the heat of combat must assume that someone armed with a shovel was planting an IED, and the holy imperative of “force protection” dictates that he take no chances.

By his third tour of Iraq, recounts Marine Jason Wayne Lemue, the rules of engagement had achieved a certain compelling clarity: “[W]e were told to just shoot people and the officers would take care of us.”

Terrifying as all of this is, the really bad news is that there is substantial reason to believe that there are fewer restrictions on the use of lethal force by domestic paramilitary police than there are on U.S. military personnel operating overseas.

This trend will likely grow much worse when the Homeland Security Apparatus is filled with veterans of the Empire’s current foreign campaigns. You know, the kind of people who can blithely dismiss the anguish of a father whose children have been gunned down by foreign invaders by saying, “Well, it’s their fault for bringing their children to a battle.”

I can’t help but see just a hint of that casual sadism in the following detail regarding the death of Aiyana Jones: Charles Jones recalls that after he heard a flash grenade followed by a gunshot, he rushed into the living room, where “police forced him to lie on the ground, with his face in his daughter’s blood.”

It was a terrible thing, of course. But at least the troops were safe. And, as Joe Barboza might observe, it wasn’t the SRT’s fault that Aiyana lived there.

Finally an admission from “Your Elected Officials” that health-care reform is just another form of taxation.

First of all, with history clearly showing us how badly, big government manages finances, do we really want  the Fed’s in the health-care industry? And does it state anywhere in our beloved constitution that they have the authority to venture into the health-care business?

It brings to mind, what they have done the last 50 years managing one of the greatest “Ponzi Schemes” eve created,  Social Security.

Here’s a suggestion, when asked to fill out the “Census Form” which I am going to save for another article entirely, because this years census form, does without a doubt, violates privacy laws, and is outside of its constitutional allowances, tell the census people, you will fill it out and return it, when they give you back all the social security money, that you gave to them, to be “HELD IN TRUST” which they did not honor.

BBC

The non-partisan body said the proposed legislation, which will likely be voted on in the House on Sunday, would cost about $940bn over the same period.

President Barack Obama said the bill represented the most significant effort to reduce the deficit since the 1990s.

Some undecided Democratic lawmakers had feared it would run up the deficit.

The reforms would deliver on Mr Obama’s top domestic priority by providing insurance to some 30 million people who currently lack it.

They would increase insurance coverage through tax credits for the middle class and expanding of the Medicaid programme for the poor.

If approved, they would represent the biggest change in the US healthcare system since the creation in the 1960s of Medicare, the government-run scheme for Americans aged 65 or over.

Budget reconciliation

The House of Representatives and the Senate adopted different versions of the healthcare bill in November and December.

The usual procedure would be for two versions of legislation to be combined into a single bill for President Obama to sign into law, but after Senate Democrats lost the 60-seat majority required to defeat a filibuster by Republicans, party leaders decided to use a controversial procedure to ensure the bill’s passage.

Health Care….Help reduce the deficit.

Part I

“There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as a result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.” – Ludwig Von Mises, Human Action, a Treatise on Economics, (Fox & Wilkes, 4th rev. ed., 1963)

Part II

“Could it all be a bad dream, or a nightmare? Is it my imagination, or have we lost our minds? It’s surreal; it’s just not believable. A grand absurdity; a great deception, a delusion of momentous proportions; based on preposterous notions; and on ideas whose time should never have come; simplicity grossly distorted and complicated; insanity passed off as logic; grandiose schemes built on falsehoods with the morality of Ponzi and Madoff; evil described as virtue; ignorance pawned off as wisdom; destruction and impoverishment in the name of humanitarianism; violence, the tool of change; preventive wars used as the road to peace; tolerance delivered by government guns; reactionary views in the guise of progress; an empire replacing the Republic; slavery sold as liberty; excellence and virtue traded for mediocracy; socialism to save capitalism; a government out of control, unrestrained by the Constitution, the rule of law, or morality; bickering over petty politics as we collapse into chaos; the philosophy that destroys us is not even defined.

We have broken from reality–a psychotic Nation. Ignorance with a pretense of knowledge replacing wisdom. Money does not grow on trees, nor does prosperity come from a government printing press or escalating deficits.

We’re now in the midst of unlimited spending of the people’s money, exorbitant taxation, deficits of trillions of dollars–spent on a failed welfare/warfare state; an epidemic of cronyism; unlimited supplies of paper money equated with wealth.

A central bank that deliberately destroys the value of the currency in secrecy, without restraint, without nary a whimper. Yet, cheered on by the pseudo-capitalists of Wall Street, the military industrial complex, and Detroit.

We police our world empire with troops on 700 bases and in 130 countries around the world. A dangerous war now spreads throughout the Middle East and Central Asia. Thousands of innocent people being killed, as we become known as the torturers of the 21st century.

We assume that by keeping the already-known torture pictures from the public’s eye, we will be remembered only as a generous and good people. If our enemies want to attack us only because we are free and rich, proof of torture would be irrelevant.

The sad part of all this is that we have forgotten what made America great, good, and prosperous. We need to quickly refresh our memories and once again reinvigorate our love, understanding, and confidence in liberty. The status quo cannot be maintained, considering the current conditions. Violence and lost liberty will result without some revolutionary thinking.

We must escape from the madness of crowds now gathering. The good news is the reversal is achievable through peaceful and intellectual means and, fortunately, the number of those who care are growing exponentially.

Of course, it could all be a bad dream, a nightmare, and that I’m seriously mistaken, overreacting, and that my worries are unfounded. I hope so. But just in case, we ought to prepare ourselves for revolutionary changes in the not-too-distant future.” RP

 The Truth About the Health Care Bill – Michael Connelly, Ret. Constitutional Attorney

Well, I have done it! I have read the entire text of proposed House Bill 3200: The Affordable Health Care Choices Act of 2009. I studied it with particular emphasis from my area of expertise, constitutional law. I was frankly concerned that parts of the proposed law that were being discussed might be unconstitutional.

What I found was far worse than what I had heard or expected. To begin with, much of what has been said about the law and its implications is in fact true, despite what the Democrats and the media are saying.

The law does provide for rationing of health care, particularly where senior citizens and other classes of citizens are involved, free health care for illegal immigrants, free abortion services, and probably forced participation in abortions by members of the medical profession.

The Bill will also eventually force private insurance companies out of business, and put everyone into a government run system. All decisions about personal health care will ultimately be made by federal bureaucrats, and most of them will not be health care professionals.

Hospital admissions, payments to physicians, and allocations of necessary medical devices will be strictly controlled by the government. However, as scary as all of that is, it just scratches the surface. In fact, I have concluded that this legislation really has no intention of providing affordable health care choices.

Instead it is a convenient cover for the most massive transfer of power to the Executive Branch of government that has ever occurred, or even been contemplated If this law or a similar one is adopted, major portions of the Constitution of the United States will effectively have been destroyed. The first thing to go will be the masterfully crafted balance of power between the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches of the U.S. Government.

 The Congress will be transferring to the Obama Administration authority in a number of different areas over the lives of the American people, and the businesses they own. The irony is that the Congress doesn’t have any authority to legislate in most of those areas to begin with! I defy anyone to read the text of the U.S. Constitution and find any authority granted to the members of Congress to regulate health care.

This legislation also provides for access, by the appointees of the Obama administration, of all of your personal healthcare direct violation of the specific provisions of the 4th Amendment to the Constitution information, your personal financial information, and the information of your employer, physician, and hospital.

All of this is a protecting against unreasonable searches and seizures. You can also forget about the right to privacy. That will have been legislated into oblivion regardless of what the 3rd and 4th Amendments may provide.

If you decide not to have healthcare insurance, or if you have private insurance that is not deemed acceptable to the Health Choices Administrator appointed by Obama, there will be a tax imposed on you. It is called a tax instead of a fine because of the intent to avoid application of the due process clause of the 5th Amendment. However, that doesn’t work because since there is nothing in the law that allows you to contest or appeal the imposition of the tax, it is definitely depriving someone of property without the due process of law.

So, there are three of those pesky amendments that the far left hate so much, out of the original ten in the Bill of Rights, that are effectively nullified by this law It doesn’t stop there though.

The 9th Amendment that provides: The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people;

The 10th Amendment states: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are preserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Under the provisions of this piece of Congressional handiwork neither the people nor the states are going to have any rights or powers at all in many areas that once were theirs to control.

I could write many more pages about this legislation, but I think you get the idea. This is not about health care; it is about seizing power and limiting rights.

Article 6 of the Constitution requires the members of both houses of Congress to “be bound by oath or affirmation to support the Constitution.” If I were a member of Congress I would not be able to vote for this legislation or anything like it, without feeling I was violating that sacred oath or affirmation.

If I voted for it anyway, I would hope the American people would hold me accountable. For those who might doubt the nature of this threat, I suggest they consult the source, the US Constitution, and Bill of Rights.

There you can see exactly what we are about to have taken from us.

Michael Connelly

Retired attorney, Constitutional Law Instructor Carrollton , Texas

Whatever the rumor these days, you can count on the major media denying it exists, and then when it comes to light, spinning it so that it appears to be the complete opposite of what is taking place. In this case the notion of martial law creeps in, but of course it is for our own good, and safety.

When does a government do things that are truly good, and protective of the public? The simple answer is almost never. Government, at least in this country was at the founding formed to secure our inalienable rights. As may have become obvious to a few, government has gone way beyond its intended purpose, and morphed into the monster that many of our Founders feared.

Our central government, along with the help of many of our governors, mayors, and legislators speeds at WARP 10 into a dictatorship. Not to worry because the talking heads will be out there spinning the web of deceit and telling us how good this is for our imaginary safety.

While the cretins in Washington, DC conjure up more thousand plus page bills that the majority of the congress never even reads, we sit by and enjoy our latest tales of celebrity nonsense. Why is it that these stories come out and receive such a tremendous amount of airtime as our crisis level rises?

The latest wave of States Sovereignty proclamations are toothless, and have been met with nothing more than contempt from federal government authoritarians. A few states, such as Montana, have enacted legislation that states; “AN ACT EXEMPTING FROM FEDERAL REGULATION UNDER THE COMMERCE CLAUSE OF THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES A FIREARM, A FIREARM ACCESSORY, OR AMMUNITION MANUFACTURED AND RETAINED IN MONTANA; AND PROVIDING AN APPLICABILITY DATE.” For the full text – http://data.opi.mt.gov/bills/2009/billhtml/HB0246.htm

In the case of the Tennessee Law, which also extends to Montana, the ATF told the state that federal law overrules. The ATF of course now has the illegitimate Supreme Court to back them up based on prior rulings of federal intervention into state affairs.

As the majority of Americans are content to lend credence to the controlled media, and the starlets they present as newspersons, our country is going into the tank. More, and more unconstitutional conduct is being levied against the people, and for the most part the information does not make its way into the general consciousness until it has been setup, and activated. This comes from the Lew Rockwell Blog:

The RAND Corporation, one of the most fecund research arms of the  Military-Industrial-Homeland Security Complex, has released a study entitled A Stability Police Force for the United States: Justification and Creating U.S. Capabilities.

The SPFOR (to use the inevitable acronym) would be a “hybrid” military/law enforcement unit created within the U.S. Marshals Service (USMS) for use “in a range of tasks such as crowd and riot control, special weapons and tactics (SWAT), and investigations of organized criminal groups” — both abroad, in UN-directed multilateral military operations, and at home, as dictated by the needs of the Regime.

Initially as small as 2–6,000 personnel, the SPFOR’s size “could be increased by augmenting it with additional federal, state, or local police from the United States” as necessary.

The RAND study, which was conducted for the U.S. Army’s Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute, recommended using the Marshals Service rather than the US Army’s Military Police  as host for the SPFOR in order to avoid conflicts with the Posse Comitatus Act, which forbids (albeit in principle more than in practice) the domestic use of the military as a law enforcement body.

“The USMS hybrid option … provides an important nondeployed mission for the force: augmenting state and local agencies, many of which currently suffer from severe personnel shortages,” states the report without explaining how the SPFOR could at once “augment” those under-manned agencies while at the same time being “augmented” by them if necessary.

That little lapse in logic is one of several indications that the report’s authors weren’t so much addressing a “problem” as making a case for a preordained “solution” — in this case, creating the vanguard of a militarized internal security force.

Building the SPFOR within the Marshals Service “would place it where its members can develop the needed skills under the hybrid staffing option,” summarizes the document. “Furthermore, the USMS has the broadest law enforcement mandate of any U.S. law enforcement agency…. [This model] provides significant domestic policing and homeland security benefits by providing thousands of additional police officers across the United States.” (Emphasis added.)

Back in 1961, the U.S. Government produced a document entitled “Freedom From War” that envisioned the creation of a globe-spanning United Nations “Peace Force” that would work in collaboration with a militarized “internal security” force in each country. Since that time, critics of the UN have anticipated the day when foreign “peacekeepers” would be assigned to police American streets and, if necessary, confiscate privately owned firearms.

While the monstrosity headquartered on the East River is a proper target of our scorn and hostility, the new RAND study underscores the fact that if “peacekeepers” end up patrolling American streets, they probably won’t be foreigners in blue berets, but homegrown jackboots commanded by Washington.

If ever we needed the people to wake up and start the process of removing all of the incumbents from office, and then the bureaucrats who have been sitting around and equally making our lives miserable the time is now.

I would start with the local sheriff who has not done the proper job in decades. Put someone in place that understands the duty to protect the people from not only the criminal element on the streets, but also the criminal element in the courts.

Next I would look into the revitalization of the Militia so that we the People can start the process of prosecutions against those who have been usurping power for years.

Kirsten Gillibrand:
“Congress could use these investigations to pressure the Federal Reserve into taking actions that could drive inflation”

The Fed does’nt need congress to pressure them to drive inflation. They do it already on theyre own, and have been doing this, for quite some time.

The Letter:

Dear Mr. XXXXX,

Thank you for taking the time to contact me about increasing transparency at the Federal Reserve.  Throughout the financial crisis of last fall and the ongoing economic slowdown, the Federal Reserve has lent substantial sums of money to help prevent a further economic meltdown using emergency powers established by Congress after the Great Depression.  Throughout my time in Congress, I have worked to promote honest and open government.  Last fall, I opposed the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) because of its lack of transparency and oversight provisions.  As a result, I share your belief that the extraordinary actions taken by the Federal Reserve merit additional scrutiny from Congress and will work to enhance transparency and oversight as part of the financial regulatory reform package currently being drafted. 

Currently, the only component of the Federal Reserve which is not regularly investigated by the Government Accountability Office is its monetary policy function.  This exemption was established to address concerns that Congress could use these investigations to pressure the Federal Reserve into taking actions that could drive inflation, causing dramatic increases in the costs of basic goods and services and undermining the Fed’s primary objective of monetary stability. 

I believe it is critically important that we continue to empower the Federal Reserve to prevent inflation while at the same time providing for a full audit of the Federal Reserve system.  As Congress begins to examine how to restructure our financial system, I believe that we must include reforms to provide greater transparency at the Federal Reserve while continuing to prevent inflation and ensure economic stability.  I will be working with my colleagues on the Senate Banking Committee to ensure that any financial reform package includes these key principles.

Thank you again for writing to express your concerns and I hope that you keep in touch with my office regarding future legislation and concerns you may have. For more information on this and other important issues, please visit my website at http://gillibrand.senate.gov and sign up for my e-newsletter.  .

Sincerely yours,

Kirsten Gillibrand
United States Senator

————————————————————————————————————————————————–

My Response:

Senator Gillibrand,

I appreciate your reply. In your response you state that “it is critically important that we continue to empower the Federal Reserve to prevent inflation…”. I invite you to read Merriam-Webster’s definition of inflation http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/INFLATION:

 “a continuing rise in the general price level usually attributed to an increase in the volume of money and credit relative to available goods and services”.

 Since the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913, the Dollar has lost nearly all of its purchasing power (roughly 97%). It is the Fed’s policy of fractional reserve banking (aka creating money out of thin air) that causes inflation. Inflation is also directly caused by the Fed when it “prints” money by writing a check to Treasury to finance the unconstitutional spending of the Federal Government that is not covered by debt sales to foreigners.

 It appears that you and your colleagues have a fundamental lack of understanding of money and its role in a free society. I strongly suggest that you educate yourself and encourage your colleagues to do the same. A good start would be to read “What Has Government Done to Our Money” by Murray Rothbard. It is available to read online as a PDF at http://mises.org/books/whathasgovernmentdone.pdf  

 What is occurring here (and has been for the better part of a century) is nothing less than the theft of our future. The founder of your party once wrote:

 ”We believe–or we act as if we believed–that although an individual father cannot alienate the labor of his son, the aggregate body of fathers may alienate the labor of all their sons, of their posterity, in the aggregate, and oblige them to pay for all the enterprises, just or unjust, profitable or ruinous, into which our vices, our passions or our personal interests may lead us. But I trust that this proposition needs only to be looked at by an American to be seen in its true point of view, and that we shall all consider ourselves unauthorized to saddle posterity with our debts, and morally bound to pay them ourselves; and consequently within what may be deemed the period of a generation, or the life of the majority.” –Thomas Jefferson to John Wayles Eppes, 1813.

You have to know deep down that what is going on here is immoral, unconstitutional and a violation of our Natural Rights. I ask that you embrace the spirit of Thomas Jefferson and stop protecting the Fed.

Respectfully,

Mr. XXXXX