Okay, welcome back to the show, everybody.
I'm your guest host, Zoe Greif.
This is Anti-War Radio, and I just got to tell you, there are two writers that actually make me squirm in my chair when I read their writing.
The first is L. Ron Hubbard, because of his ham-handed attempts at science fiction.
But the second is, he makes me squirm for a very different reason.
His name is Will Grigg.
Welcome to the show, Will Grigg.
How you doing?
It's a pleasure to be with you.
I was just going to finish the thought that the only reason that your writing makes me squirm is because it's so well-written, and the topic you cover is so icky.
And that is the police state, and your latest offering at freedominourtime.blogspot.com about catheterization as a weapon is disgust-ipating.
Please tell the listeners what you're talking about.
It certainly is a squirm-inducing subject.
What we're talking about is object rape.
It's referred to somewhat clinically as forced catheterization.
And a catheter, of course, is a medical implement that is inserted into the urethra of a human being.
When it's done for purposes that are defensible in the medical context, it can be suitable for treatment.
But the problem here is that when this is done to an involuntary victim, when this is done to somebody who's not given consent, it is an act of object rape.
And I talk about three cases in this article.
The first deals with a young man by the name of Stephen Cook.
Two of these cases, by the way, took place in the state of Utah.
And I cite the Utah state code, that section of the state code dealing with sex offenses that defines object rape by way of illustrating the irreducible nature of this offense.
It doesn't matter whether this is done with a permission slip from a judge called an arrest warrant or a search warrant.
That doesn't change the nature of what is being done here.
What is being done is the violation of the bodily integrity of an unwilling victim.
Mr. Cook is 22 years old.
Four years ago, he was a student at Snow College in Ephraim, Utah in, I believe, Sanpete County in that state.
He and a friend of an evening were standing outside of a vehicle that belonged to his friend.
Mr. Cook was the passenger, not the driver.
When they were accosted by a group of police officers who, pursuant to their training, lied by saying that they smelled marijuana.
When I say that the police lied, what I'm doing is I'm describing their modus operandi, their investigative technique.
Police officers are trained to lie.
They're expected to lie.
They are authorized to lie.
They are rewarded for lying.
And they'll get fired if they don't, right?
And he should have known better, but he consented to a search of his person, as did his friend.
His friend consented to a search of the vehicle.
The vehicle was searched stem to stern.
A canine officer, that is to say a drug sniffing dog, was brought to the scene.
They weren't able to turn up any contraband on the person of these two young men or in the vehicle.
They popped open the trunk and they found a glass pipe, which itself is not probable cause or evidence of anything because they didn't know who put the pipe in the trunk.
But in any case, Mr. Cook didn't own the car, so we can assume that that wasn't his pipe.
The police officers instructed the two of them to go to a nearby police station and Cook was told to drive the car, supposedly for the purpose of saving his friendly impound fees.
That's another lie, of course.
It's a pretext to get them into a controlled environment.
But this also underscores a very important fact.
If the officers suspected that he was under the influence of marijuana, they wouldn't be telling him to drive the car.
The two of them drove to the police station where they were told that they would obtain a warrant for a bodily fluids search.
And this supposedly is something that is compatible with the Fourth Amendment.
I don't see how it could possibly be compatible with the Fourth Amendment or with the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
There's a huge exception to the Fifth Amendment that has been carved out for driving under the influence of DWI laws.
In any case, they were told that they would have to submit a sample of urine.
Neither of them could produce on cue, of course.
That's the sort of thing that most people can't do when they're simply commanded to.
You're not going to be able to perform on command.
And so they were supposedly told that the judge in question – it wasn't a judge.
He was a county commissioner.
He was acting in the equivalent capacity of a justice of the peace in spite of the fact that he wasn't an officer of the court.
So he wasn't an actual judge.
He was just boss hog of that county?
In any case, he supposedly issued a warrant for a bodily fluids search.
And because neither of these two young men could produce on cue, they were taken to a nearby hospital where a cook was held down and he was forcibly catheterized.
This was done for the purpose of terrorizing his friend into complying with the demand for a bodily fluid sample.
The samples were disposed of.
They weren't even examined or subjected to laboratory scrutiny.
They were disposed of.
Mr. Cook was charged with resisting arrest and a couple of other bogus charges.
He ended up having to take a deal in abeyance of a sentence that was a form of probation that eventually meant that the record of his arrest was expunged.
Meanwhile, he's out several thousand dollars.
He has been sexually assaulted by three police officers, one of whom is retired.
The other two – and I think it's important that their names be made public – have been promoted.
They're now police chiefs.
Chad Huff is the police chief of Fountain Green, Utah.
Justin Agard is now the police chief of Moroni City.
That's a very small town in Utah.
And I believe that those two municipal governments are duty-bound to post a notice at city limits alerting people who arrive in their cities that their police departments are under the command of violent sexual offenders.
Because under Utah law, this is an act of object rape.
It is an aggravated sexual assault.
It's a felony.
The prescribed sentence for which is ten years in prison and enrollment on the sexual offender registry for life.
And by virtue of receiving this permission slip from a guy who wasn't even a judge, but rather a county magistrate – not even a county magistrate, he was a county commissioner, was the title that was told to me by the attorney representing Mr. Cook in his lawsuit – by virtue of receiving that permission slip, supposedly they're entitled to commit this act of sexual aggression.
But that doesn't change the nature of what is happening here.
You're talking about the forcible violation of a human being's genitals in order to obtain self-incriminating evidence for that person's bloodstream.
There are no exigent circumstances that can justify this, even if you could justify it somehow as a law enforcement necessity under certain circumstances.
So you're dealing here with a situation in which there was no evidence that these two have been doing anything other than smoking cigarettes.
The probable cause was manufactured in order to obtain the warrant.
The police officers had to perjure themselves in the affidavit.
They obtained a bogus warrant from somebody who wasn't an officer of the court and had no legal experience.
And that's just one example of the sort of thing that has happened in Utah on many other occasions.
The second case I refer to involves a young woman by the name of Haley Owen.
This happened in 2004 in – I believe it was in Sevier County in Utah.
She was driving a car and she was waylaid by members of the Central Utah Narcotics Task Force who were looking for somebody else.
They believed that the car was being driven by a person they suspected was a drug dealer.
And when they stopped the car and found that she was inside, they ordered her out and, with abusive and profane language, demanded that she answer a number of questions she couldn't answer.
They accused her of lying about who she was and what she was doing.
They demanded to search the car.
She said she didn't give them her consent to do so.
They told her that they knew more about the law than she did and they'd search it anyway.
They demanded that she undergo tests for driving under the influence.
And at some point, she'd simply had a surfeit of their attitude and decided to give back as she had been given.
This, of course, was the offense called contempt of cop.
So she was dragged to a nearby police department and they obtained a bodily fluids warrant.
And the bodily fluids warrant was actually issued by a judge on the basis of a perjured affidavit that, in many details, lied about the circumstances of the stop.
And another sexual assault ensued, which was even uglier than the one that was inflicted on Stephen Cook.
Oh, that's disgust-i-pating.
Sorry to use that word twice.
I should use my language better, like Will Grigg does.
Read them in our time at blogspot.com.
Object rape, catheterization as punishment for contempt of cop.
More on the other side, Antiwar Radio.
Welcome back to the show, everybody.
It's Antiwar Radio.
Will Grigg is the guest.
Judicially authorized rape, the newest weapon in the prohibitionist arsenal.
Object rape specifically is the type of rape, judicially authorized.
And, well, Will, we got through the first case, the Cook case, and you were talking about the Hooper case.
Did you get through the Hooper case?
And on to the third one, or do you still have more to talk about with the Hooper case?
I think with the Hooper case, actually, her name was Haley Owen at the time.
She's now known as Haley Owen Hooper.
Correct.
There are some other details that I think are worth disclosing or discussing here.
Then please continue.
...is that you're talking about a woman who was arrested under false pretenses.
The affidavit was perjurious.
They said that they'd arrested her because they knew that she didn't have a driver's license.
Of course, this wasn't true.
They didn't stop her because they knew that she was driving without a license.
They didn't know she was driving the car when the stop took place.
They were looking for somebody else who actually turned himself in the same evening.
They arrested her because they didn't like her attitude.
She was 5'1", 105 pounds of defiant female humanity, which is something that simply couldn't be countenanced by the heroes in government-issued costumes.
They took her to a nearby police station.
Then from there, they took her to a hospital.
They obtained what was described as a bodily fluids warrant by way of a fax, I think, from a judge.
This all takes place at night, by the way.
This will give you some idea of the amount of judicial deliberation that goes into these warrants.
Most of these warrants are issued on the basis of a fill-in-the-blanks form that a police officer has that he can either fax or email to the offices or to the home address of a judge who approves these things perfunctorily.
In this case, the warrant didn't specify that they wanted urine.
Now, what had happened is that they threw her onto the examination table.
They pulled off her pants and her underwear.
Four police officers, at least one of whom weighed, by his self-serving estimate, 260 pounds, were pressing down upon her in order to keep her from struggling free of this impending sexual violation.
When she said, why don't you take my blood, take a blood sample in order to determine if I'm driving under the influence, the fellow in the cowboy hat grunted, the judge wants urine.
That, of course, was another lie.
Bear in mind, once again, police are trained to lie.
They're expected to.
They're rewarded for lying.
The affidavit didn't specify urine.
The judge didn't confirm, after a phone call was made, I think for the purpose of creating a paper trail, that the search warrant would extend to a forcible collection of urine.
Supposedly, one of his assistants had told a member of the task force that the judge had approved this, but there's no record of that conversation.
There's no evidence to confirm that the task force member actually talked to the aide.
There was no written record.
There was no audio recording.
This is all basically rooted in the say-so of this task force member who made this supposed phone call.
The search warrant didn't specify that they wanted urine.
The judge didn't demand urine.
This was done, once again, by way of summary punishment.
She was held down and she was partially unclothed in the presence of four large, sweaty, overweight males.
In describing this a number of years later, she said, it was like I had been raped and all those guards were helping.
That's an act of gang rape.
It's an act of aggravated sexual assault.
This was the risk for a lawsuit, as one might expect.
She filed a suit against everybody involved in this.
And I'm sure the judge ruled in her favor and fired the bad guys and awarded her lots of money, right, Will?
Because this is America, right?
Well, the district judge ruled in her favor by dismissing the so-called evidence collected through this act of rape.
So there was a successful suppression hearing to suppress the evidence that had been collected by rape.
The federal district judge who reviewed the lawsuit granted that the affidavit was misleading and dishonest.
A better word for that, of course, is perjurious.
But the federal district judge said that there was reason to think that there might have been some kind of colorable law enforcement purpose served by this procedure and that the law supposedly isn't clear that forced catheterization is an unsuitable and facially unconscionable violation of personal integrity.
I don't know how it could be anything other than that.
I think a forcible blood draw meets that description under the Fourth Amendment and the Fifth Amendment, certainly.
And then the federal district judge, the federal appellate judge in Salt Lake City, Dee Benson, in July 2010 dismissed the lawsuit against the task force on the grounds of qualified immunity, which is this magical conjuration that is pronounced in order to justify after the fact anything that is done by a state functionary that constitutes an act of criminal violence against the mundane.
Just last September, this is following the decision in Utah, there was another case, a lawsuit that was filed by Jamie Lockhart of Indiana that was dismissed by another federal judge on the basis of qualified immunity.
And he had been stopped in March 2009 by an officer, Brian Miller, who, once again, cleaving to the expected script, professed to have smelled alcohol on Lockhart's breath.
He administered a breathalyzer test and Mr. Lockhart passed it.
He came in under the legal limit, but yet he was arrested and taken to a local police station and told that he would have to undergo some kind of a bodily fluids test.
And the prefabricated form was sent off to a judge, and a bodily fluids warrant was obtained.
Mr. Lockhart was taken to Dearborn County Hospital, and he wasn't able to provide a urine sample.
And so he was told that he would be charged with obstruction, that is to say a form of resisting arrest because he refused to pee on command.
He was charged with a Class D felony for failure to urinate on the command of a law enforcement officer, and then strapped down and forced to undergo a catheterization.
Mr. Lockhart, as it happens, suffers from an enlarged prostate, and so the catheterization left him with an infection and with an exacerbated prostate condition.
He had to spend a great deal of money on antibiotics and subsequent treatment.
He filed a lawsuit, and in the decision that threw out the lawsuit against the officers who inflicted this sexual degradation on Lockhart, the judge took note of a number of cases dealing with forced catheterization, or object rape as I prefer to call it.
Two of which, the cases of Sparks v.
Stutler and Levine v.
Roebuck, involved procedures that were inflicted on inmates of state correctional institutions, that is to say that were prison rape conducted by officials as supposed investigatory protocol.
In each of those two cases, the trial judge ruled that the invasive procedure of forced catheterization was a form of assault.
It was facially unconstitutional.
In the appeal, there were two separate federal courts that upheld the forced catheterization of inmates in prison on the basis of qualified immunity, once again for the prison guards who committed this crime.
But the point I'm making here is that those two cases are interesting to me in that they both illustrate something I have been saying now for a number of years, and that is that the way that law enforcement is trained to look upon the rest of us, as I refer to us as mundane, were looked upon as either active or incipient criminals.
We're looked upon as offenders, as if we were living in a prison society where they're the prison guards, and we're the rest of perps or criminals who must be kept under heel at all times unless some kind of violence coalesced and threatened the physical safety of those who have been assigned to be society's prison guards.
Once again, the best way to describe this is a form of prison rape, and I think that's become paradigmatic of the homeland security apparatus that rules us right now, is the fact that you have these two cases that emerge from a prison milieu that were the basis of these public decisions that upheld eventually through the federal dismissal on the basis of qualified immunity upheld the process of forced catheterization as an investigative technique in the war on drugs.
The war on drugs is a very literal war.
It is the longest running war, active war, in the history of the U.S. government.
War, of course, is aggressive violence conducted for purposes ordained by the political class, by representatives of the political class, by a duly authorized agent of the state.
Whether you're talking about drone strikes in Yemen or Pakistan or military occupations of Afghanistan or Iraq or paramilitary police tactical squads and SWAT teams kicking in doors at the crack of dawn or late at night in order to conduct drug raids, these are all forms of warfare.
And forced catheterization, that is to say object rape, is a wartime atrocity.
It is a war crime committed by people who are carrying out the directives of the political class to make war on the American public on the basis of what is suspected to be in our bloodstream.
Absolutely.
And gosh, it's almost like they just – it's a new dirty trick that they just kind of thought of.
Or has this been going on for a long time and people are only now just ruling on it kind of thing?
There are a couple of precedents having to do with similar invasive searches that go back to the 1960s, having to do in one instance with an effort by police to induce vomiting in order to force a suspect to throw up suspected contraband that he had swallowed.
In another case, they were using other forms of medical intervention to obtain the same kind of evidence.
But forced catheterization is a really nasty little nuance that has just become into vogue over the last four or five years, and I hope that there's dramatic pushback against it very soon.
Wow, that's horrible.
It is horrible.
Did you hear about the shenanigans in Aurora, Colorado where they just cordoned off part of the highway and arrested everybody looking for a bank robbery suspect like a month or two ago?
Did you see the picture of that goon pointing the shotgun at that 11, 12-year-old skateboarder?
Yes, I do.
And it turns out, funnily enough, that my roommate knows that guy by name because her stepdad is a law enforcement officer in Colorado and whatever.
So I made it my wallpaper on my computer.
But it sure would be fun to talk about that sometime.
Is the ACLU doing anything about that or anybody?
I'm trying to find out.
Actually, I'm supposed to be talking sometime this afternoon with a fellow in Nevada who's trying to set up a mixed martial arts fight with a cop who killed an unarmed veteran in a parking lot last December.
Oh, I heard something about that.
Yeah, and that's something else that I'm hopefully going to be writing about pretty soon.
That's another potential subject for an interview that would be appropriate.
Because you get really, over the last six or seven months, this mini epidemic of incidents in which veterans, usually psychologically disabled veterans, are getting thrown to the ground or shot or disarmed by police.
And there's this new focus on the idea of having special jail or prison facilities set up for veterans.
That's pregnant with all kinds of awful possibilities.
Oh boy, howdy.
You can either become a police officer.
Once you've mustered out of the military, you can either join the ranks of the Domestic Army of Occupation or you can be on the receiving end of their violence is what that's coming down to.
On the special, special receiving end of their special violence.
Exactly.
They'll make a particular example out of you.
But yeah, I'm going to be looking into the Aurora thing as soon as my desk is relatively clear of other things that sort of piled up on top of it.
Oh yeah, there's never not enough police state to talk about.
Well, I'll let you get back to it.
Thanks for your time and answering my questions.
Thank you.
And I look forward to the next time we get to speak.
Okay, you take care, Zoe.
Okay, you too, Will.
Bye-bye.
