The Militant Libertarian

I'm pissed off and I'm a libertarian. What else you wanna know?

Saturday, December 02, 2006

Wrong Door...

Original article here: http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6651
by Radley Balko and Joel Berger

Radley Balko is a policy analyst specializing in civil liberties issues and is the author of the Cato study, "Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America." Mr. Berger is an attorney representing the Williams and Garrison families and a former New York City Law Department executive.

The Supreme Court ruled this June that evidence seized in an illegally performed "no-knock" police raid can still be used against a defendant. Though disturbing in its own right, Hudson v. Michigan touched on only a small part of a larger problem -- the trend toward paramilitary tactics in domestic policing.

Criminologist Peter Kraska estimates that the number of SWAT team "call-outs" soared past 40,000 in 2001 (the latest year for which figures are available) from about 3,000 in 1981. The vast majority are employed for routine police work -- such as serving drug warrants -- not the types of situations for which SWAT teams were originally established. And because drug policing often involves tips from confidential informants -- many of whom are drug dealers themselves, or convicts looking for leniency -- it's rife with bad information. As a result, hundreds of innocent families and civilians have been wrongly subjected to violent, forced-entry raids.

Last year, for example, New York City police mistakenly handcuffed Mini Matos, a deaf, asthmatic Coney Island woman during a pre-dawn raid. While her young son and daughter burst into tears, Ms. Matos's plea to use her asthma pump was ignored until an officer realized they entered the wrong apartment.

Home invasions can also provoke deadly violence because forced-entry raids offer very little margin for error. Since SWAT teams began proliferating in the late 1980s, at least 40 innocent people have been killed in botched raids. There are dozens more cases where low-level, nonviolent offenders and police officers themselves have been killed.

Last summer a SWAT team in Sunrise, Fla., shot and killed 23-year-old Anthony Diotaiuto -- a bartender and part-time student with no history of violence -- during an early-morning raid on his home. Police found all of an ounce of marijuana. This January a member of the Fairfax, Va. SWAT team accidentally shot and killed Salvatore Culosi, a local optometrist with no criminal record, no history of violence and no weapons in his home. Police were investigating Culosi for wagering on sporting events with friends.

Public officials are rarely held accountable when mistakes happen. The Culosi family has yet to be given access to documents related to the investigation of his death, including why a SWAT team was sent to apprehend him in the first place. More than a year after Diotaiuto's death, his family too has been denied access to any of the documents it needs to move forward with a lawsuit.

New York City provides perhaps the most egregious example of public officials' reluctance to rein in the excessive use of paramilitary tactics. Throughout the 1990s, the city's newspapers reported a troubling, continuing pattern of "wrong door" drug raids. In many cases, tactical teams raided homes based solely on uncorroborated tips from unproven informants.

Members of the city's Civilian Complaint Review Board cautioned that they were seeing increasing complaints of botched raids, but limited jurisdiction and bureaucratic turf wars prevented them from doing anything about it. The principal result of the CCRB's warnings was the creation of a special police unit for the sole purpose of fixing locks, doors and windows in cases where forced-entry searches were performed on the wrong premises. Civil rights attorneys warned that without more substantial changes, it was only a matter of time before an innocent person would be killed in a botched drug raid.

They were right. In 2003, acting on a bad tip from an informant, police mistakenly raided the Harlem home of Alberta Spruill, a 57-year-old city worker. The violence of the incursion literally scared Spruill to death; she died of a heart attack at the scene. The raid spurred public outrage, calls for reform, and promises from the city to change its ways. The NYPD published new guidelines calling for more reliability when taking tips from informants. The city also promised greater vigilance in conducting surveillance and double-checking addresses before a SWAT team was sent in.

But later, during the course of a lawsuit stemming from another, mistaken raid -- in 1992, on corrections officer Edward Garrison, his elderly mother and two young daughters -- the city declared that all of the post-Spruill reforms it had promised were merely discretionary, not enforceable in court, and could be revoked at will by any future mayor or police commissioner.

In any case, botched raids have not stopped. In 2004, police arrested a Brooklyn father of two in a drug raid and held him for six months at Riker's Island. In March of this year they dropped all the charges, conceding that he had been wrongly targeted. The man's lawyer called it the worst case of malicious prosecution she'd ever seen. Also in 2004, police mistakenly raided the home of Martin and Leona Goldberg, a Brooklyn couple in their 80s, when an informant provided bad information. "It was the most frightening experience of my life," Mrs. Goldberg later said. "I thought it was a terrorist attack."

The NYPD goofed again in 2005, when a SWAT team raided the Brooklyn apartment of the Williams family, instead of the targeted apartment on the same floor. Police continued to search the apartment even after it was obvious they were in the wrong home. This year, according to the CCRB, there have already been at least 15 mistaken raids.

A few cities, such as New Haven, Conn., and San Jose, Calif., restrict the use of SWAT teams to cases where a suspect presents an immediate threat. Denver dramatically cut back the number of "no-knock" raids conducted after a SWAT team shot and killed an innocent man in a botched raid in 1999, and follow-up investigations revealed severe deficiencies in the how police had obtained "no-knock" warrants.

But these examples are few and far between. Most of the country is moving toward more militarization, more aggressive drug policing -- and less accountability when things go wrong.

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Tuesday, November 28, 2006

Recruiting and Smoking



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Monday, November 27, 2006

Central Bankers Seek Totalitarian Power

By Henry Makow Ph.D. (http://www.savethemales.ca/)

http://www.savethemales.ca/

The "War on Terror" is a ruse by central bankers to control every aspect of
your life.

Rereading "The Red Symphony" recently, I was shocked to read an insider's
statement that the bankers are not content with infinite wealth, but want
unlimited power.

"The Red Symphony" is a 1938 Stalinist Secret Police (NKVD) interrogation of
Christian Rakovsky, a Soviet ambassador who was a close associate of Leon
Trotsky, Rothschild's agent.

I introduced this explosive 50-page document to my readers two years ago. It
strips the veil from modern history and explains the real meaning of
Revolution, Communism, Freemasonry and War. It was not intended to become
public knowledge. The translator, a Dr. J. Landowsky, made an unauthorized
copy.

The human experiment is endangered by private interests who have usurped the
function of money creation. Modern history reflects the gradual process by
which they transfer all wealth and power to themselves, destroying Western
Civilization and creating a world police state.

Rakovsky, whose real name was Chaim Rakover, was sentenced to death in
Stalin's purge of the Trotskyite faction of the party. Leon Trotsky wrote in
his autobiography, My Life, : "Christian G. Rakovsky... played an active
part in the inner workings of four Socialist parties-- the Bulgarian,
Russian, French, and Roumanian--to become eventually one of the leaders of
the Soviet Federation, a founder of the Communist Internationale, President
of the Ukranian Soviet of People's Commissaries, and the diplomatic Soviet
representative in England and France ..."

Rakovsky tried to convince his interrogator that Stalin should cooperate
with the bankers who "are just like you and me. The fact that they control
unlimited money, insofar as they themselves create it, does not...determine
the limits of their ambitions . . .The bankers, have the impulse towards
power, towards full power. Just as you and me."

They created the Communist state as a "machine of total power" unprecedented
in history. In the past, due to many factors, "there was always room for
individual freedom. Do you understand that those who already partially rule
over nations and worldly governments have pretensions to absolute
domination? Understand that this is the only thing which they have not yet
reached." (emphasis mine)

A pernicious force paralyzes our national life. Rakovsky identifies it:
"Imagine to yourself, if you can a small number of people having unlimited
power through the possession of real wealth, and you will see they are the
absolute dictators of the stock exchange and [economy]...If you have enough
imagination then...you will see [their] anarchical, moral and social
influence, i.e. a revolutionary one...Do you now understand?"

The Revolutionary Movement, which defines modern history, was a means to
increase banker power by destroying the old order.

In the French Revolution power subtlely passed to the bankers who weren't
constrained by Christian niceties, Rakovsky says. "The supreme Royal power
was taken over by persons, whose moral, intellectual and cosmopolitan
qualities did allow them to use it. It is clear that these were people who
had never been Christians, but cosmopolitans."

Communism, far from distributing wealth, is designed to concentrate it in
the hands of the world's wealthiest people. (The State owns the wealth and
they own the State.) And Marxism, "before being a philosophical, economic
and political system, is a conspiracy for the revolution."

Rakovsky scoffs at the "elementary Marxism...the demagogic popular one" that
is used to dupe the intellectuals and the masses.

[Whatever its intrinsic merits, Socialism seems designed to bribe and make
people dependent on socialist politicians and big government, which the
bankers control.]

As for Freemasonry: "Every Masonic organization tries to create all the
required prerequisites for the triumph of the Communist revolution; this is
the obvious aim of Freemasonry," says Rakovsky, a high-ranking Mason
himself.

The aim of the Revolution is no less than to redefine reality in terms of
the interests of the bankers. This involves the promotion of subjective
truth over objective truth. If Lenin "feels something to be real" then it is
real. "For him every reality, every truth was relative in the face of the
sole and absolute one: the revolution."

In other words, white is black and up is down. This is the way it was in the
Soviet Union and this is now happening to us. Truth and justice are being
replaced by political diktat. "Political correctness" a Bolshevik term is
now in common usage. Physicists like Steven Jones who question Sept.11 are
silenced. Historians like David Irving are jailed.

Rakovsky marvels that "the benches on which sat the greasy usurers to trade
in their moneys, have now been converted into temples, which stand
magnificently at every corner of contemporary big towns with their heathen
colonnades, and crowds go there ...to bring assiduously their deposits of
all their possessions to the god of money..."

He says the Soviet five-pointed star represents the five Rothschild brothers
with their banks, who possess colossal accumulations of wealth, the greatest
ever known."

Isn't it strange that Marx never mentions this fact? Rakovsky asks. Isn't it
strange that during revolutions, the mobs never attack the bankers, their
mansions or banks?

War is the means by which the central bankers advance their goal of
totalitarian world government. Rakovsky says Trotsky was behind the murder
of Arch Duke Ferdinand (which sparked WWI.) He recalls the phrase used by
the mother of the five Rothschild brothers: "'If my sons want it, then there
will be no war.' This means that they were the arbiters, the masters of
peace and war, but not emperors. Are you capable of visualizing the fact of
such a cosmic importance? Is not war already a revolutionary function?
War�the Commune. Since that time every war was a giant step towards
Communism."

After the murder of [Illuminati member Weimar Foreign Minister] Walter
Rathenau in 1922, the Illuminati give political or financial positions only
to intermediaries, Rakowsky says. "Obviously to persons who are trustworthy
and loyal, which can be guaranteed a thousand ways: thus one can assert that
those bankers and politicians [in the public eye] - are only men of straw .
.. . even though they occupy very high places and are made to appear to be
the authors of the plans which are carried out."

In 1938, Rakovsky outlined three reasons for the upcoming Second World War.
The first is that Hitler began to print his own money. "This is very
serious. Much more than all the external and cruel factors in
National-Socialism."

Secondly, the "fully developed nationalism of Western Europe is an obstacle
to Marxism...the need for the destruction of nationalism is alone worth a
war in Europe."

Finally, Communism cannot triumph unless it suppresses the "still living
Christianity." He refers to the "permanent revolution" as dating from the
birth of Christ, and the reformation as "its first partial victory" because
it split Christianity. This suggests that the "conspiracy" also contains a
racial or religious factor.

"In reality, Christianity is our only real enemy since all the political and
economic phenomena of the Bourgeois States. Christianity controlling the
individual is capable of annulling the revolutionary projection of the
neutral Soviet or Atheist State."

Now the Central Bankers are promoting World War Three as in "The Clash of
Civilizations." Substitute Islam for Christianity above, and pit
"Christians" against them.

CONCLUSION
Our beliefs must adjust to the truth and not vice versa. Apparently, the
truth is that a relatively small clique of Jewish banking families and their
non-Jewish allies in the leading families of Europe and America have usurped
control of money creation, and with it the destiny of the world.

This overclass owns or controls most of the world's largest corporations,
media organizations, intelligence agencies, secret societies, universities,
politicians, foundations, think tanks and NGO's. It also appears to dominate
organized crime.

Sept. 11, the War on Terror and Iraq are part of an inexorable process by
which this overclass increases its wealth and control. The end goal is a
world police state in which the masses will be deprived of their wealth,
freedom and possibly their lives.

Neo Cons are really Neo Com-munists. They jeopardize the security of their
fellow Jews (as well as all Americans) by their evil machinations. Jews
should follow my example and repudiate them.

The overclass wants us to see it as a "Jewish problem." This way it can
deflect blame onto innocent Jews and then dismiss opposition as "hatred" and
"prejudice." The problem is mainly one of money creation (credit) that has
led to an untenable concentration of wealth and power in a few hands.

Almost everyone who is "successful" in society, Jewish or not, is forced,
wittingly or unwittingly to align themselves with the overclass. Our
religious, cultural and political institutions have been subverted. This
explains the false quality of social life in the West.

As we celebrate Christmas, let's remember Christ's message: God is Love. God
is more powerful than the satanic force that holds mankind in its thrall.
But His will cannot be done unless men do it.

Whatever the cost, doing nothing will cost more. The affluence we now enjoy
is part of an ageold plot to ensnare and enslave humanity.

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