12/15/09 – Will Grigg – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Right now I'm looking at a blog entry at LewRockwell.com called Rand Corporation Blueprint for Militarized Stability Police Force.
It's by Will Grigg.
He's the author of the great book Liberty in Eclipse and the blog Pro Libertate, which you can find at freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
Welcome back to the show, Will.
How are you doing?
Scott, it's great to be with you, and I'm doing great.
Great.
Well, I'm really happy to have you here, except that I really am, I guess, kind of concerned about the occasion here.
What is this?
No, I don't even want you to answer, but I guess I got to.
Will, what is a stability police force?
What is the Rand Corporation trying to do to us now?
The Rand Corporation has created this template for what it calls a hybrid entity that would combine elements of law enforcement and military activity, and it would be called the stability police force.
The stability police force, I guess SPF would be the acronym of choice for those who want to have something pronounceable.
SP4 is probably what they'll end up calling it, but a stability police force would find its home within the U.S. Marshal Service.
They examined half a dozen or so options in terms of trying to find an institutional home for this new unit.
The two that made the final cut were the military police element of the Army and the U.S. Marshal Service, and they chose the latter for a couple of reasons, the most important of which is that by housing this within the U.S. Marshal Service, they'd be able to use it domestically.
They wouldn't have a problem with the posse comitatus restrictions, which are largely theoretical anyhow.
The posse comitatus principle, the prohibition against the use of active-duty military in law enforcement operations within the United States is almost entirely dead letter, and it has been for a long, long time.
We can thank the War on Drugs and the Reagan administration, really, for carving out most of the exceptions that have been used over the last couple of decades.
But I guess for the purpose of making sure that every T was crossed and every I was dotted, they decided it would be better to use the U.S. Marshal Service, which has got a broad mandate within the United States, very useful.
Well, I'm confused about that.
I thought that the Marshal Service had a pretty narrow mandate.
Aren't they just basically they work for the judges, right, for the federal judges?
They're supposed to work for the federal judges.
They're also involved, of course, in collecting on student loans that go bad.
I mean, if you end up not paying a student loan, you'll end up with the U.S. Marshal Service.
They actually can be seconded to just about any law enforcement agency in the country, depending upon the needs.
Their first responsibility is to provide security for judges and also for other federal officials.
For instance, there have been some controversies out here in the western United States involving the ATF.
And when the ATF finds itself properly on the receiving end of really intense criticism, the trends into what are perceived as threats, they'll often have the U.S. Marshal Service backing them up.
But the fact is you've got this large and very well-funded entity that is the U.S. Marshal Service.
It's really not doing a whole lot.
They don't really have a lot on their plate.
And in principle, they can be used for all kinds of missions.
And owing to the diversity of missions and the fact that these people are just sitting around eating tax dollars and not putting out anything, perhaps the Rand Corporation thought it would be best to turn the U.S. Marshal Service into the home of this new militarized central government police agency.
Well, and you know what they were thinking, too.
They were thinking, man, Antonin Scalia is going to love this.
He'll be kind of a commander, right?
Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles by torturing people.
Come on, everybody.
He always did want to be in the executive branch.
I think that's a pretty good call.
Antonin Scalia does strike me as sort of a person who spends a lot of time holding up a picture of Jack Bauer with one hand, as it were.
And this is the sort of thing that I think would definitely give a thrill to the Scalia's of the world and the other authoritarian types who think that there just isn't enough going on in this country by way of people kicking in doors and shoving automatic weapons in the face of terrified people.
And that's part of the job description of this unit.
It would be used overseas to train and to equip the police forces of whatever satrapies the imperial military would leave in its wake.
You're talking about missions in places like Iraq and Afghanistan and also Kosovo and other places in the Balkans.
This is where they're sort of gestated.
There were a lot of missions that the U.S. military got involved in following the Dayton Accord.
Wait a minute.
So this sounds OK, then.
Wait, we're talking about taking American cops and sending them somewhere else?
I kind of like that.
I mean, I feel sorry for the foreigners, but...
Well, unfortunately, what they're talking about here is creating a unit that would start replicating itself.
It would be sort of an engine that would go of itself.
You'd have them going overseas to carry out these missions to train and then to equip and to prepare all these forces that would be left in the wake.
Well, I don't know.
We can't really say in the wake because they never leave once they've invaded and occupied a country, unless they leave ignominiously, as in Vietnam in 1975 or Somalia in 1994.
But by and large, what they would do on those missions is they'd go in to try to provide some kind of a supplement to what the occupation force is doing by way of a nominally civilian police force.
That'd actually be just a militarized police force under military control overseas.
But while they're not in deployment mode, they would be here in the United States, and they would be in a position where their numbers could be replenished pretty much at the whim of the government.
They'd be tasked to carry out whatever missions the government, meaning the federal government, the central government of the United States, which is basically running law enforcement.
Now, we might as well abandon the pretense that we have local police forces or local sheriff's departments.
We really don't anymore.
But their numbers would expand to meet the needs of the regime in terms of what they would do domestically.
And their mission domestically would be pretty much identical to what you'd see going on overseas.
You're talking about SWAT missions.
You're talking about the type of clear-and-hold operations that you find in urban military situations overseas.
And that police doctrine, that military doctrine, actually began here in counter-narcotics and counter-gang activity in the late 1990s in places in Northern California, Oakland, and the environs.
You saw police departments using the clear-and-hold strategy that was later used in the surge in some parts of Baghdad.
And it's just a really good example.
Are you talking about where they were seizing guns from the projects?
Yeah, seizing guns from the projects or operating on the assumption that if there was somebody who had some kind of a colorable connection to a suspected narcotics operation who was a resident in a home or a visitor in a home, that that entire home was pretty much suspect, and everybody in that home could be considered part of that person's extended criminal cohort.
Yeah, forget Iraq.
America is America's West Bank.
That really is.
That's really the case.
I mean, the inner cities of the United States, particularly when you're talking about places like Northern California, Oakland, the Bay Area, Chicago, Cabrini Green back in the early 1990s was a place where the Clinton administration was doing a lot of this nonsense with lower-endless searches.
Sheriff Arpaio's Stygian little domain there in Maricopa County where they do so-called crime sweeps, where they just simply go in and vacuum up everybody who looks Latino or listens to Mexican music.
These are basically the same types of operations that we're talking about.
When they occur overseas, under the heading of military operations, you've got a situation now where they're just abandoning the pretense that there is any really hard and fast distinction between the military and law enforcement.
This blended, hybrid, commerical organization that the RAND Corporation is talking about would be just a way of bringing these two things together and creating really the vanguard of what would be a full-spectrum, militarized hybrid of military and law enforcement.
Well, you know, it's interesting because as you talk about all this coming together, it used to be, I remember on an episode of Cops, wow, that show's been on for a long time.
This was a long, long time ago.
And the cops said, there's only two kinds of people in this world, all right?
Suspects and victims.
Oh, boy.
And I was thinking, you know, that was actually pretty good compared to the way it is now, where no, there's only one kind of person in this world, suspects.
Well, I guess maybe two, suspects and cops.
But that's it.
Yeah, exactly.
And in fact, now, a suspect and an enemy, those definitions are converging more and more the same way that the police mission and the military mission are being combined.
Yeah, the citizen becomes a suspect, becomes a perp, becomes an enemy combatant.
That, I think, is the chain of being we're talking about here, or the evolution of the perception on the part of the police and the punitive populist element of the population that backs them up with no questions asked.
It's interesting.
I get an email update called the Law Enforcement Examiner.
It's written by a fellow who's a representative of one of the major police associations.
And it's interesting to me how often the updates that I get from them, the columns they write have nothing to do with conventional police affairs, but rather they deal with counterterrorism, they deal with military operations, they deal with prospective wars.
The most recent one I got from him was an update from this front group called Christian Leaders for Nuclear-Free Iran that believe that the mandate of the Great Commission of the New Testament would include the immolation of people in Iran who've never done anything to injure us or threaten us in any way.
And it all comes by way of this guy who's a high-ranking official in one of the major police associations.
And the way he sees the world is exactly as you're describing it, Scott.
They're basically enemies, and then they're the forces of order.
And the police on the domestic front are the equivalent of the troops overseas, in this person's estimation.
I've actually run a bumper sticker on my blog talking about supporting the troops overseas and here at home, where on the one hand you have a soldier used to represent the former and a police officer used to represent the latter.
And that really is a dangerous evolution of the mindset, not only of law enforcement, but once again of a pretty significant portion of the public.
I forget if we've talked about this specifically on the show before, but there was a really great article in the Austin Chronicle about a foot chase that took place across a bridge over Highway 183 and into the parking lot there at Springdale and Ed Bluestein.
And they went into that parking lot and there were two cops chasing the so-called perp or the suspect or the enemy combatant or whatever he was.
And the one that was the Iraq War veteran just pulled out his gun and started firing as they're chasing this guy through the parking lot.
And one of those things reminds me of the killing of that guy Orlando something in Houston years ago, where a bullet actually went through the back of the minivan and through the back seat where the child seat was.
But the mother and the child were inside the grocery store.
But that's where the bullet ended up, just like that raid years and years ago in Houston where they had the wrong address and no warrant and they killed the guy in his bed.
And one of the stray bullets, oh and the whole gunfight started because one of the cops shot the one in front of him in the back.
And so they all started shooting.
And a few of the bullets went through the wall and right into the space where the crib was except that the couple had moved out the day before with their kid the day before.
So I always like those near-miss of kids when police go nuts.
But here's the real point, and I'm sorry for going on and on.
The real point is they talked to the cop in the article and he says, Man, I'm not fit to be a cop.
I'm still in that war mode.
And it took the other cop screaming at me to stop, to even know, to even think for a second that what I was doing was not the right procedure.
Anyway, this guy's running through a parking lot in Austin, Texas shooting because he's used to, you know, if you accidentally kill a couple of Fallujans, it doesn't matter.
You know, that's how he's been trained.
Well, it's good to see that there was some residual understanding on the part of his fellow police officers that there is a distinction here, that there is a separate mindset.
There is a different perspective that you have to adopt when you're supposed to be a peace officer.
You simply don't draw down and start shooting people indiscriminately.
But, of course, what we have now, and this is something I've been talking about and warning about now for, well, almost an entire decade now, post-September 11, 2001, when it was clear to me that we were going to be involved in these open-ended wars overseas.
I said, What's going to happen is you're going to have these people who are reservists and guardsmen who are going to be bearing the brunt of these long-term occupations, who are going to go over there and develop habits of mind and reflexes that are unsuitable to domestic law enforcement, and they're going to bring those habits of mind and reflexes back to the streets of the United States.
And that's going to bring about an acceleration of these bad trends that really began decades ago.
And that's exactly what's happening now.
I'm surprised, given what I know about the Austin police, that there were people in the company of this individual who were trying to snap him out of that killing trance.
I'm glad to see that there is some element of restraint still, at least in some of these police departments some of the time.
But when you have this effort, this conscious policy decision being promoted by the RAND Corporation, and I should point out that this is a study that was paid for by the United States Army's Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute.
So this is something that was done on contract with the federal government.
It's not just a sterile think piece put out by a think tank.
But when they're promoting the deliberate amalgamation of the military and law enforcement for this purpose, and when they talk about the advantages of getting around the posse comitatus restrictions and using this militarized police force domestically in all kinds of missions, multiple missions that they have in mind, this is something that's a very ominous development.
Really, it is sort of the clinching argument here that there is a deliberate effort, a policy mandate being handed down to create or to duplicate, retrofit, however you want to describe the procedure.
The same modus operandi, the same military approach domestically that we've seen overseas, that's one of the things that I've been trying to help people understand.
There are a lot of Americans who are so studiously indifferent to the fate of collusions or people who live in Afghanistan.
They're just one undifferentiated brown mass of others.
But I keep telling people that you cannot be an empire abroad and a republic at home.
And a regime that gets the scent of blood in its nostrils is going to be feral, whether you're talking about its operations overseas or its operations next door.
And I'm hoping that there are going to be people now who have become sufficiently disenchanted with the federal government now that Obama's in charge, the people who are nominal conservatives or even some quasi-libertarian folks, who are now going to have real misgivings about the fact that he's inherited this huge and metastasizing apparatus of coercion and death and regimentation, and start doing something about it.
It's well past time that they did.
Oh, yeah, right, like conservatives can put together cause and effect.
Give me a break.
I thought it was funny.
I'm sorry to waste your time on this.
Well, I think it's notable and funny.
And that is that the subtitle of this thing is Justification and Creating U.S. Capabilities.
It's basically a solution in search of a problem.
It's amazing.
It really is amazing that they don't even know that they're not supposed to write that in the title.
Somebody must have missed the final lettuce on the galleys of this or something.
I don't know.
It's very unusual to find that degree of candor from people who are putting material out like this.
Usually they will talk about some urgent crisis or some other dire necessity that justifies the policy that they are promoting.
In this case, they had the policy already set.
They had to try to find some way to rationalize it.
And so you end up with the word justification in the title of this.
You know, the thing is, too, I mean, what crisis?
You know, America is screwed up in a lot of ways, but it's not like there's a civil war going on.
It's not like there are al-Qaeda sleeper cells and a bunch of things blowing up and left-wing anarchists and right-wing militia guys shooting each other and throwing molotov cocktails.
This whole thing is for what purpose?
Yeah, that's the question that really suggests an answer that most people don't want to confront, and that is that we've reached a point where the velvet glove is off and we're seeing the iron fist unveiled.
And I think that as our illusion of prosperity evanesces, that the illusion that the government is in any way benign is going to be another casualty.
Now, I happen to think that the latter is a good thing.
Unfortunately, the way that people are going to be disabused of that notion, I think, is going to be that we're going to find more and more frequently people are going to be pushed around with the same kind of impunity that the government displays when dealing with foreigners.
I mean, you've probably read about the case of the border recently with this Canadian science fiction author.
Yeah, I did see that.
Man, was that something else?
You know, was it you that I read the quote of him where he's saying, yeah, in a parallel universe, everything went fine this weekend, but in the one I'm stuck in, this is what happened to me, oh my God.
Exactly.
You know, beaten to the ground, pepper sprayed, and then, as he put it, kicked within an inch of his life, I'm being euphemistic, and then detained and charged with assault.
It's just amazing how easily you can be charged with assault in the sacred personage of a government employee.
I mean, basically, if you attack somebody's fist with your face, and the assailant in question, the one that hit you, is a federal officer, then you're guilty of assault in the eyes of the people who put the docket sheet together.
But this poor guy, who apparently is just the soul of benevolence, and the sort of guy who goes around the streets of Toronto rescuing stray cats, I mean, this is not a terrorist we're talking about, had the temerity to ask what was going on when his car was singled out for a random search.
And because he didn't keep his eyes downcast, and because he was demanded to be treated like a human being, he was immediately placed under arrest.
I mean, the routine is, okay, well, turn around, I'm going to cuff you now, because you're not being cooperative.
And the point I made when I wrote about that on Lew Rockwell's blog was that anybody who's had the experience of going into or coming out of a totalitarian or severely authoritarian country knows that the border guards are people who are clothed with complete impunity.
They're people who can do whatever they want to whomever they want, on any pretext they can devise.
And you're told, keep your eyes down and be docile, be utterly cooperative, don't do anything to call attention to yourself.
And what happened is that these two guys were going through the border, he was in the company of a friend, and because he made a fuss, they both got arrested.
The other part of the story that I didn't have a chance to report when I first wrote about this was that his friend, who did nothing to attract attention to himself, also had the shackles put on his wrists.
He was arrested and detained without charges, but the point is they took his freedom away, he was basically abducted, and the rest is an abduction when it's conducted for no legally justifiable reason.
Because he was in the company of somebody who demanded to be treated like a human being.
Now that is a very important display of what the government is all about now, and it's becoming more and more overt.
And it's not just at the borders, you have the border...
Well, and back to the judges.
I mean, I thought that if you're a judge, you're supposed to get your thrill and exercise your ambition by saying, hey, government, how dare you do this to this citizen?
Everybody, look at how tough I am.
I've seen a judge actually call the executive branch the government.
The government says this, the government says that, as though he's not one of them.
And that's his power, is in checking them, right?
Yeah.
No?
You'd think.
I mean, because we keep hearing about, and especially with the technology the way it is, and especially with your blog, keeping track of virtually every case of police abuse in this country, we can see this epidemic.
Yeah.
Whose job is it to stop them?
Nobody's anymore?
Apparently not.
You really...
It's just so frustrating to me.
We're supposed to have some kind of a government of checks and balances where the institutional rivalries, and quite frankly the personal ambition of officials, is supposed to work in such a way that they largely checkmate each other.
You're supposed to use power to keep check on power, as Madison put it.
But unfortunately this has been replaced by a system that's almost entirely collaborative and collegial.
And every once in a while you do see a really bizarre instance where there is a butting of heads, and a crisis ensues because suddenly the system's breaking down, supposedly, when that's how the system is supposed to work.
A really good example is what's going on right now in Maricopa County, where the Mussolini of Maricopa County, Joe Arpaio, is in an outright war with the entire county government of Maricopa County.
He wants to investigate the entire county board of supervisors.
He's filing lawsuits against various judges.
And a lot of this has to do with the fact that judges are trying to check rain, what Arpaio is doing.
There was recently a case where a deputy sheriff in open court reached over and stole a document off the table of a defense attorney.
Now you don't do that.
That's the property of the defense attorney.
It's protected by attorney-client privilege.
But with brazenness that defies description, this guy just grabbed a piece of paper, handed it to an associate.
Right there on camera, I've seen it myself.
Right on camera, sure.
And he had to rifle through the guy's papers, or through the woman's papers, the female defense attorney we were talking about, and he grabbed the paper two or three sheets down.
But later on he said that he had seen something on that paper that suggested that there was a crime in progress or a threat to the security of the court.
Well, there was a judge who ordered this last son of Krypton with the magic x-ray vision to apologize for what he had done.
Now that's the very least that we should expect.
He should have been hit with a fine and professional sanctions.
He shouldn't have been let into a courtroom again.
If anybody else had done that sort of thing, we would have been slapped with a criminal contempt charge and sent to jail and probably hit with a huge fine and ended up with a felony on our record.
But Arpaio said, no, no, no.
You see, my deputies don't take orders from judges.
Well, they should if they're acting as officers of the court.
But from Arpaio's point of view, his guys answer only to him.
And because a judge was saying, you see, there is this thing called separation of powers.
There is this situation where in certain contexts, yes, your deputies are supposed to obey the instructions of a judge, not just in the sense that every citizen in certain circumstances is expected to, but if you're in a courtroom acting as a bailiff, then you're supposed to be obeying the orders of a judge.
And because a judge had the authority to say this to Arpaio, Arpaio turned around and filed a federal complaint against this judge, and he's seeking criminal charges against the judge because basically he wants to destroy the checks and balances of Maricopa County and have it a case of ein Volk am Reich, ein Führer.
And that's the sort of thing that's happening not through means as brutal and blatant and vulgar as Arpaio was using, but you see this convergence of interests and convergence of policy to the point where there aren't even partisan disagreements about the exercise of power.
You've got Obama, for instance, pursuing and amplifying the Bush administration's claims of legal immunity here for people who torture.
It's sort of a Nuremberg and reverse type policy where they want to make sure that if there's anybody who's hung out to dry for carrying out a policy ordained by the executive branch in which people violate the laws against torture, that it'll be people at the bottom of the pyramid and that the people up the ladder of accountability are immunized against it.
That's basically what the Obama administration is promoting now and defending in court.
And so your question is a wonderful one, Scott.
Who's going to be bringing this to a halt?
And the answer that urges itself upon me, and it's one I don't like, the people who are going to bring this to a halt would be the Chinese by dumping the dollar and bringing the system down through outright bankruptcy.
Well, I mean, this is the so-called crisis that it seems like at least some people in government, well, I don't know, I don't know how far-fetched this is.
And maybe you can tie this in with what you said earlier, which sounded perhaps a bit hyperbolic about there really is no such thing as the 18,000 different police jurisdictions in America anymore.
It's all basically nationalized as it is already.
And then I guess the possibility that what's happening here is they know that in order to bail out all the banks and create enough money to keep the richest people from having all their wealth go up in smoke during this crisis, that they have to destroy the dollar and reduce America to the chaos that would in fact ensue if the currency becomes worth nothing and the division of labor breaks down, the 18-wheelers stop rolling and price controls and all the rest of the craziness that comes with a collapsing currency.
I mean, do you think that's what this is for?
I mean, they have the Military Commissions Act sitting there.
They can still give you or me the PIDEA treatment legally if they want.
Sure, yes.
That would be one logical outcome from the scenario that we're seeing right now.
I mean, how crazy is that anyway?
Because, you know, I saw this thing going around last week about, oh, the Russians say that this is going to happen in February and Obama's going to declare war against America.
My first clue that that was bogus was they said there was 430 million Americans.
And I thought, wow, well, if you're off by 100 million Americans, I probably don't believe anything else in your stupid article.
But in the long term, how crazy is that?
You know, that's what I wonder.
Well, the capability exists and I think that the intention exists.
It's a question of what the circumstances would be.
And the fact that they're spending so much money on militarizing and subsidizing nominally local law enforcement agencies.
I'll give you one very quick example.
In the little town of, well, it's 35,000.
It's a little town, Buckeye, Arizona.
It's part of Maricopa County.
They recently received a $250,000 Homeland Security grant to buy an armored vehicle for the police.
Now, they don't have violent crime in Buckeye.
A couple of years ago, the last year, I was able to track down the statistics for it.
I think they had maybe 50 violent crimes and most of those were assault.
They had one murder.
So you're dealing with a community that's not being riven with all kinds of violent crime and terrorism and tumult.
But they're beefing up the local police there, small force, with this armored vehicle and all kinds of other grants that they're getting.
You take a look at that and you're thinking, why are they doing this with these little towns that are relatively placid?
And one of the things that I noticed, of course, is that Buckeye was very severely hit by the collapse of the housing bubble.
And it would be an interesting study, this is something that I intend to do if I ever have time, to find out how many of these most severely hit communities are the ones that are receiving a lot of the money from the Pentagon, from the Department of Homeland Security, to go and beef up the police.
Because the logical conclusion from that, one logical surmise, I should say, would be that they want to preposition people there to deal with the possibility of wide-scale civic unrest and violence as a result of the collapsing economy.
And the thing is, they could actually precipitate that kind of violence if they're really heavy-handed in dealing with whatever troubles might ensue when people get desperate and the economy goes really bad.
Well, and they really do kind of say that in here, too, that that's what they're working on.
Exactly.
They are very candid, up to a point.
I mean, not often as candid as the RAND Corporation was in saying, well, we're looking for an excuse to do this.
But, I mean, when they talk about, you know, local police just might not have the resources, as we talked about with Mark Ames on the show from The Exiled Online, where that town in Alabama where the guy went on the killing spree and the army was called out, it was that exact county had a story where the local corrupt police, pardon me, mayor and city council officials had basically been preyed on like the economic hitman with the Wall Street bankers and bought into these ridiculous bond packages and all these securities and all these things, and they completely bankrupted their county.
So when this guy cracked, you know, for, you know, that's a whole other story why this guy went on his shooting rampage.
But anyway, when he did, it just seemed like a matter of course that you would have the army come and fill the role of the local deputies that didn't exist because they couldn't afford them because all their money had been taken to Wall Street and, oh, it's gone.
Yeah, that's a potential template for future action elsewhere.
Another possibility that we're seeing much more frequently is that you just simply unleash the police as forfeiture, civil forfeiture, asset forfeiture, where they simply steal people blind.
That's going on down in Texas.
That's going on, there's an epidemic of it right now in Michigan, depressed Michigan, in and around Detroit.
You've got rates of civil asset forfeiture now that there are multiple hundreds of percent higher than they were just a few years ago.
There's not been a concomitant increase in violent crime, but the police have simply been unleashed to go and steal people blind.
Just this morning I was reading about this case of a trucker by the name of Eduardo Arancinia who was stopped by the police in Kansas and they jacked half a million dollars from him and they charged him with being a courier for drug proceeds.
There's no evidence that he was involved in anything other than carrying a large amount of money in his truck.
The federal judge who ruled on this said, as a matter of fact, they're entitled to seize this money and they weren't able to.
The pretext, of course, is that they were going to try to find out if there's drug residue on the money, and of course there probably would because there's drug residue on most of the money in circulation right now.
Not just most, like 90-something percent.
I read it in the Times and the Washington Post a few weeks ago.
Yeah, you can round it up to all of it.
Yeah, yeah, it is virtually all money in America.
Somebody snorted coke through it, I guess.
Yeah, but here's the thing that I find just amazing.
The police took that money, they deposited it in a bank, and then they got a cashier's check for the amount, and the money was just put back into circulation.
So it never even went through the pantomime, the pretense that they were going to test it for drug residue.
They just put in the money and then spent it.
They didn't even make...
This is vulgar, obvious highway robbery.
That sort of thing is going on as well.
That's the sort of thing that could become a flashpoint for future violence, and we know from Waco and other episodes that one of the things that will really bring down the wrath of the government on you is giving people the impression that you can make a stand, you can mount some kind of resistance against the government when they've decided to target you for annihilation.
The Davidians didn't play along with the Showtime script.
They beat back the ATF, and then the government did what it had to for almost two months in order to wear them down and finally annihilate them.
And it wouldn't surprise me to see that same dynamic play out sometime in the future, perhaps in many instances in the future, and that's one of those things that keep me up at night.
Well, you know, I kind of wish that the Constitution had never been submitted to the state conventions back then, but...
Well, taking a look at what's going on right now, I think we owe George III an apology.
Oh, God.
Yeah, well, maybe somebody does.
But, you know, as long as we do have this government, this national U.S. government up there in D.C., it is presumably, you know, the pretense is that it's based on the Constitution.
The Constitution is that social contract, you know, in actual language with periods at the end of sentences and things like that, which is the social contract.
It's not just imaginary, it's actually a Constitution.
And it was recently ruled, I think by the Supreme Court, or maybe it was just a federal court, but I think it was even the Supreme Court ruled that the Congress's attempt to ban any federal money going to ACORN amounted to a bill of attainder.
And now I don't care about ACORN.
The only thing notable about ACORN is I think it's hilarious the way the most powerful people in our society can make the massive people hate the least powerful people in our society and blame them for all our problems.
Exactly.
The point, the real point is that Article 1, Section 9 says Congress cannot make a law, a bill of attainder, which means a law that says that Will Grigg is guilty.
Will Grigg shall be punished this way or that.
That is for the courts to decide.
The police are separate from the prosecutors.
A grand jury has to let them go forward in the first place.
Then you can have a trial in a third branch of government courtroom.
And only then can you take Will Grigg's liberty away.
According to the law, you can't just do it with an act of Congress.
And the court said, hey, it says right there in Article 1, Section 9, you can't do this.
And what I wonder is why they even bother.
I mean, if the clause before that that says that they can't suspend the writ of habeas corpus unless there's an invasion or rebellion doesn't really count, and if all the Tenth Amendment and all the rest of the Bill of Rights and all these other things don't count, why should the bill of attainder count?
But I guess the other way to look at it is, maybe the Constitution can be used by a court sometimes to hold the Congress and or the executive to account and forbid them from going a certain direction too far in violating our liberty.
Now, in this case, it's kind of a minor case.
But the point is that Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution is the law or it ain't, right?
That's the point.
Exactly.
Well, it's interesting to me as well.
It seems that the only part of the Constitution that is taken at face value by the government ruling us is the worst element in the Constitution, and that is the eminent domain clause.
There's all kinds of activity right now going on where the government is invoking eminent domain, which I think is something that should have been left out of the Constitution.
You know, the government really should have been a mendicant that should have had to beg for anything that it wanted to buy as opposed to claiming basically default jurisdiction over property and then deciding what fair market value would be for the property that they're going to steal.
There was a good ruling in New York just over the last couple of days in an eminent domain case where somebody got slapped down for wanting to seize a bunch of property, I believe on behalf of Columbia University.
Don't hold me to the details of that.
But it was a good ruling that basically was talking about the idea of plunder and theft being rationalized by law here and how the judge wasn't having any of it.
So there are a few good judges out there.
But I think your larger point is sound.
The Constitution, however imperfect it is, which of course is riddled with imperfections being a human artifact, does at least represent some kind of a sticking point between that which is somewhat imperfect and in some ways undesirable and that which is outright intolerable.
And what we're living under right now, quite frankly, is entirely intolerable.
I mean, we should not be treated this way.
We shouldn't be in a position where every time we see somebody in a government-issued costume, we're worried about the possibility of being the victims of completely unjustified violence in which we have no right of defense and no legal recourse.
We shouldn't be worried about having everything that we own and everything that we've earned confiscated through inflation, taxation, and eminent domain.
But that's the kind of a country we live in right now.
You know what I wonder, man?
What if those guys, I mean, let's assume for a moment that the story that these guys went from America to Pakistan to join up the Jihad to fight against Americans, what if they had blown something up and we were at red alert?
What kind of consequences would we be looking at?
Would they be even pretending anymore?
Would we have drones in the skies over every American city and people put in military prison?
I don't know.
What do you think would happen?
If there had been, say, a September 11th-size attack, 3,000 killed?
After September 11th, you had thousands of people rounded up and detained, some of them for months or even years.
It was after the first September 11th.
You had the Congress in a fit of pants-sweating panic basically write a blank check that was filled in later for the Patriot Act.
These are measures that Congress was willing to abide and the federal courts were willing to abide after the first September 11th.
I mean, after another decade's worth of warfare and profligate spending, if you had a second September 11th, I think basically all bets are off and you'd end up with a situation where there would be literal mass roundups.
You'd have a fully regimented society within a couple of months.
Not right away.
It's not the sort of thing where they could flip a switch and suddenly we'd be living in the Reich.
But you'd have all of these residual or latent powers that you find that are not being exercised yet in all these post-September 11th enactments.
Those would become fully active.
Chances are, just anything that was handed down by executive decree in terms of expanding the powers that exist well beyond even their present badly inflated state, those would be enacted without much controversy.
Certainly none of the Congress.
You talk about the drones over American cities.
You've got a situation now where you've got an outright war going on where hundreds of people are being killed in Pakistan by exactly the same drones that are used on the southern border of the United States.
And nobody really seems to connect the dots.
Well, Ted Rall, give him credit for that.
The cartoonist and commentator of a leftist bent.
He's the only guy I've seen, apart from maybe you and me and a few others of a libertarian stripe, who connected those dots saying, good grief, you can send predator drones and hellfire missiles on presidential decree into Pakistan, which the country we're not at war with, and then wipe people out indiscriminately where you've got hundreds of innocent people dying for every person on the CIA list that they consider a terrorist.
And you've got the same drones in the skies of the southern United States.
What's to stop a president from using those within the United States?
And if he can make a case, however fanciful, that you had these networks that have been responsible for this hypothetical September 11th style incident we're discussing, Scott, I don't see why you wouldn't have people being knocked off through the use of remote drones.
And this, of course, is a subject rather fertile with black humor, given the fact that one of the things that the Bushlings said in the drive for war against Iraq was that Saddam Hussein was going to unleash death-dealing drones over the skies of the United States.
Well, the drones are here now, folks.
Well, you know, the thing is, too, is that right-wingers are armed.
And it sort of seems to me like if there's one thing we can hope for, it's that the Democrats won't have the gumption to really try to turn America into a military dictatorship.
That'll be the Petraeus presidency, right?
Yeah, probably.
Because right-wingers won't take that from a Democrat.
Right-wingers will start shooting Democrats if it came to that.
You're probably right about that.
So good.
We have a couple more years until Petraeus is sworn in, I guess.
All right.
Well, Greg, I've got to tell you, man, you're the best.
I don't know what we'd do without you.
Everybody, you can find Will at LewRockwell.com slash blog virtually every day.
His blog is Pro Libertate at freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
And run out and get the book or buy it on Amazon.com.
It's called Liberty in Eclipse.
More great stuff from Will.
Greg, thanks very much again.
Thanks, Scott.
Take care.