Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

January 24, 2012

With the help of federal subsidies, police in East Orange, New Jersey have created a system of immersive surveillance that appears to be modeled after the totalitarian “pre-crime” system depicted in the sci-fi film “Minority Report.”

Officers remotely operating any of the street’s plentiful surveillance cameras can “paint” suspicious targets with a directed light beam up to a city block away. Patrol cars are likewise equipped with cameras that scan the license plates of all vehicles and have access to detailed databases containing personal information on drivers, and that are cross-referenced to various “watch lists.”

“The message to criminals is: The police are observing you, the police are recording you, and the police are responding,” states East Orange Police Chief William Robinson. Of course, police in East Orange — like their counterparts elsewhere — are most likely prepared to arrest any citizen who observes, records, and responds to criminal abuse by police officers.

Meanwhile, the NYPD is working with the Pentagon to deploy a series of body scanners that can subject all pedestrians to virtual strip-searches.

Those who presume to rule us no longer bother to pretend as if they care about the Constitution.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

January 23, 2012

Bill Clinton cheated, stayed married, and wagged a finger at his critics as he was impeached. Newt Gingrich cheated, ruined two marriages, demanded an “open marriage” from his second wife, waggled his jowls at CNN correspondent John King,  then went on to win a resounding victory in the South Carolina GOP presidential primary.

Gingrich, who was of draft age during the Vietnam War, married one of his high school teachers and claimed multiple draft deferments while conducting a series of extra-marital affairs. At one point he told an acquaintance that his first wife wasn’t pretty enough to be First Lady, so he arranged to divorce her while she was recovering from exploratory cancer surgery. He then married his then-current mistress, to whom he was married when he became House Speaker in 1994. Shortly after rising to that position he began an affair with the woman who would become his third wife, eventually divorcing his second wife after she had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

On the eve of the South Carolina Primary, Fox News analyst Keith Ablow, a consulting psychiatrist, insisted that Gingrich’s sociopathic behavior displayed a set of traits best described as presidential. Given the depravity of the regime that rules us, Dr. Ablow might have a point.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

January 20, 2012

Los Angeles resident Shawn Nee, an amateur photographer, was accosted by sheriff’s deputies while taking photos of subway turnstiles. Because Nee was doing nothing illegal, and the deputy had no business harassing him, the shutterbug quite properly told the officer to mind his own business.

This prompted a smug extortion threat from the uniformed bully:

“You know, I’ll just submit your name to TLO (the Terrorism Liaison Officer program). Every time your driver’s license gets scanned, every time you take a plane, any time you go on any type of public transit system where they look at your identification, you’re going to be stopped. You will be detained. You’ll be searched. You will be on the FBI’s hit list.”

This is a perfect snapshot of the so-called “local” police at work, using the threat of all-encompassing, Soviet-style harassment to browbeat an innocent man into surrendering his constitutionally protected rights.

In principle, and increasingly in practice, every police department and Sheriff’s Office in this country is part of a seamlessly integrated totalitarian homeland security apparatus. How can we support our local police when truly local police no longer exist?

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

January 19, 2012

Brian Hitchcock won’t be going to prison for the supposed offense of being rear-ended by Hermosa Beach Police Officer Anthony Parente last June.

The motorcycle cop had pulled behind Hitchcock at a stoplight; when the light changed, he pulled in even tighter and inexplicably hit his siren and running lights. When Hitchcock reflexively stopped, Parente plowed into the back of the BMW. The officer was thrown head-over-heels, landing in the backseat of the open convertible with his boots sticking in the air. Horrified, Hitchcock scrambled to help the injured officer, who requested his radio, and then called in the report “Officer down.”

Although the LA County DA’s office found no evidence that Hitchcock was to blame for the accident, Parente’s colleagues conducted a month-long investigation into the driver seeking evidence of “anti-police bias.” One detective lured the victim to a lunch for what was described as a friendly chat – which he secretly recorded in the hope of capturing an incriminating remark. The police then attempted to have the middle-aged man prosecuted for assaulting Parente with a deadly weapon.

Four eyewitnesses testified that Parente had caused the crash, and the cop’s on-board video recorder conveniently malfunctioned. The charge was dismissed – but only after a lying cop and his buddies put an innocent man through hell.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

January 18, 2012

“This is a Glock Forty,” explained DEA agent Lee Paige while lecturing an audience of about fifty students on gun safety. After dry-firing the handgun, Paige informed the gathering, “I’m the only one I know professional enough to carry this Glock Forty” – and then immediately shot himself in the left foot.

Attempting to salvage some object lesson from his foolishness, Paige attempted to handle another gun – which prompted the schoolchildren to plead with the dangerously inept government employee to put the weapon down.

The videotape of the April 2004 incident in Orlando was turned over to the DEA. Shortly thereafter it leaked onto the internet, prompting Paige to file a lawsuit against the agency. That lawsuit was dismissed on January 17.

“As a result of the disclosure … by the DEA, Mr. Paige became and is the target of jokes, derision, ridicule and disparaging comments,” protests the lawsuit. “As a result of the notoriety arising from the disclosure of the videotape, Mr. Paige is no longer permitted or able to give educational motivational speeches and presentations.”

This is exactly as it should be: Paige earned every syllable of ridicule he has experienced, and should never be allowed near firearms again. Then again, the same is true of most government employees.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

January 17, 2012

On two occasions roughly four and a half years apart, Dr. Ron Paul has provoked the wrath of a supposedly Christian audience by insisting that the government is bound by the Golden Rule.

During the 2007 Values Voter Summit, sponsored by the Family Research Council, Dr. Paul’s closing peroration focused on the Christian Just War Doctrine and the evils of perpetual war. His invocations of the Prince of Peace provoked a chorus of boos that began even before he was finished speaking.

A very similar spectacle unfolded during the South Carolina GOP Presidential Debate on January 16.

“Maybe we should consider a Golden Rule in foreign policy – don’t do to other nations what we don’t want them to do to us,” stated Dr. Paul, triggering another outburst of booing and voluble disapproval from the pious conservatives in attendance.

Reporting from the debate, political commentator Roger Simon pointed out that the crowd was inert “until death raised its zany head.” As crowd reactions from the past several primary debates have demonstrated, Simon observes, “the best thing a Republican candidate can do is promise them anything — as long as it involves somebody dying.”

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

January 16, 2012

Following the Spanish-American War of 1898, the U.S. found itself mired in a campaign to suppress an independence movement in the Philippines. That conflict was condemned by many American commentators as a colonial enterprise unworthy of our country’s heritage. Minnesota Senator Knute Nelson parried those criticisms by insisting that “We come as ministering angels, not as despots” – a characterization that would have been a difficult sell to the 100,000 Filipinos who were killed and the millions more who were wounded, imprisoned, or displaced.

Last week a video clip emerged of a group of Marines – that is, American “ministering angels” -- anointing the bodies of dead Afghan rebels by urinating on the corpses. Similar photos and video clips have depicted U.S. helicopter pilots laughing as they shot at civilians who were carrying an injured man to a van in Baghdad, or American troops smiling while posing next to dead Afghans and Iraqis. [Eleven members of a U.S. Army “kill team” in Afghanistan that targeted unarmed Afghans and cut off their fingers as war trophies have been convicted of war crimes.]

Even in those exceedingly rare circumstances when war is fought for legitimate self-defense, there is nothing angelic about the impulses it sets free in the souls of those who prosecute it.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

January 13, 2012

In his diary for November 25, 1941, FDR’s Secretary of War Henry Stimson described a meeting that day of the administration’s “War Cabinet” at the White House. The question discussed at that meeting was “how we should maneuver [the Japanese] into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves.”

By now it is indisputable that rather than seeking to avoid war with Japan, FDR deliberately facilitated the Pearl Harbor attack as a back door to war with the Axis. The Obama administration is following the same approach to Iran.  On December 31, Obama signed into law a package of economic sanctions against Iran. The death this week of an Iranian scientist in a car bombing is the latest in a series of mysterious assassinations carried out by either U.S. or Israeli intelligence.

Writing in The Jerusalem Post, former Israeli intelligence official Avi Perry predicts that this campaign of provocation will pay off when Iran attacks a U.S. aircraft carrier: “The Iranian attack on an American military vessel will serve as a justification and a pretext for a retaliatory move by the US….”

This “`Pearl Harbor’ scenario,” Perry concludes, would give Washington “the perfect rationalization” for an entirely avoidable war – and not for the first time.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

January 12, 2012

Former Republican Congressman Mark Siljander was sentenced to prison for offenses related to his work for a Muslim charity called the Islamic American Relief Agency.  The charges arose from Siljander’s efforts to circumvent sanctions imposed on Iraq during the 1990s.

Federal Judge Nanette Laughrey emphasized that Siljander did not provide material support for terrorism, and that his lobbying efforts were unsuccessful. However, she insisted that he had to be sent to prison as a “deterrent” to others.

Meanwhile, revelations accumulate regarding the DEA’s material support for Mexican drug cartels, which includes laundering millions of dollars. The ATF has also pitched in to help the cartels by pressuring U.S. gun dealers to sell high-performance rifles to people suspected of working for those crime syndicates.

Dozens of prominent current and former officials are actively lobbying on behalf of the so-called Iranian People’s Mujahadeen, a listed terrorist group that has killed U.S. citizens. That same group is being supported by Washington as a covert asset to use against the current Iranian government.

When Siljander tried to break an embargo, it was considered a crime; when the U.S. government materially aids criminals and terrorists, it’s considered policy.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

January 11, 2012

Ten years ago today, the U.S. government opened the Cuban detention facility that has come to be known as “Gitmo.” It was soon filled with hundreds of prisoners, many of whom were swept up by Pakistani bounty hunters eager to collect rewards offered by the CIA.

German citizen Murnat Kurnaz, who spent nearly five years in Gitmo without being accused of a crime, has described being tortured by interrogators, first in Afghanistan then in Gitmo: “… they dunked my head under water and punched me in the stomach … At one point, I was chained to the ceiling of a building and hung by my hands for days…. There were more beatings, endless solitary confinement, freezing temperatures and extreme heat, days of forced sleeplessness.”

Bosnian citizen Lakhdar Boumediene, another innocent detainee, likewise recalls being tortured through prolonged sleep deprivation and being forced to spend hours in painful stress positions. He points out that 171 men remain at Gitmo.

Gitmo has become a laboratory for indefinite detention and institutionalized abuse – considerations that loom especially large now that Congress has authorized the military to detain any American suspected of being an enemy of the State.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.