Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

May 7, 2012

After Colorado Springs resident Jarrott Martinez ended a five-year live-in relationship with Sydney Huffman, his ex-girlfriend did her formidable best to ruin his life.

Making expert use of the ?domestic violence? system with the help of a cabal of officers in the Colorado Springs Police Department, Huffman accused Martinez of beating, strangling, and otherwise assaulting her. Huffman?s charges were not supported by witnesses, photos, or video footage, or physical evidence from a medical exam.

On at least two occasions, Huffman admitted to the chief investigating detective that she had lied. For each of the alleged incidents, Martinez could provide an invincible alibi ? including security video footage and receipts documenting that he was miles away from Huffman on an evening he supposedly attacked her.

Nonetheless, Martinez was repeatedly  arrested ? once with the use of a SWAT team ? and spent 60 days in pre-trial detention, much of it in solitary. Martinez was acquitted twice on separate sets of charges.

?I saw a system that didn?t care what it did to people,? Martinez recalls. He once served that system: Until his arrest, he was a police officer, as is his accuser ? who continues to draw a salary despite facing criminal charges of her own.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

May 2, 2012

The experience of Daniel Chong, a senior at the University of California-San Diego, tidily encapsulates nearly everything that is wrong with the murderous fraud called the ?War on Drugs.?

Chong was one of several people swept up in an April 21 narcotics raid by the Drug Enforcement Administration. After federal agents questioned Chong, he was told that he would be released. Instead he was thrown into a five-by-ten-foot detention cell, where he was held for five days without food, water, toilet facilities, or bedding.

The DEA?s story was that Chong was simply ?forgotten.? After several days, Chong -- worried he might die in captivity ? shattered his eyeglasses and used broken shards to carve the words ?Sorry, mother? into his arm.

Chong was not suspected of using or trafficking in drugs; one of his interrogators told him he was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Yet during his imprisonment he found and used a small amount of a white, powdery substance that was found to be methamphetamine.

So the DEA imprisoned and tortured an innocent man ? and made a drug user out of him. This trifecta of incompetence, cruelty, and corruption is the War on Drugs in microcosm.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us 

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

May 1, 2012

Barack Obama, who claims the authority to order the execution or indefinite military detention of any U.S. citizen he considers a terrorist, has issued a ?Law Day USA 2012? proclamation piously professing his undying devotion to due process.

According to Mr. Obama, this year?s Law Day theme is ?No Courts, No Justice, No Freedom,? which underscores ?the historic role our courts have played in protecting the fundamental rights and liberties of all Americans. Our courts are the guarantors of civil justice, social order, and public safety, and we must do everything we can to enable their critical work.?

Read with a perceptive eye, that decree is a potent indictment of the Obama administration.

The same president who affixed his signature to those words has murdered at least two U.S. citizens ? one of them a 16-year-old boy ? without due process of any kind.

Not only does the Obama administration consider courts unnecessary in dealing with presidentially designated ?terrorists,? it finds them similarly useless in addressing crimes committed by high-ranking government officials ? such as the overtly criminal torture program now openly boasted about by those who carried it out.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

April 30, 2012

If a customer neglects to pay his internet service provider, the company discontinues the service. The service ends when the payments stop.

Someone who stops paying the government, by way of contrast, can expect personalized service from the government, which produces nothing useful and is devoted entirely to the practice of coercion. Government is the only enterprise whose so-called customers -- that is, victims ? make payments in order to prevent the delivery of the services provided.

Displaying a perverse creativity typical of its criminal caste, the government afflicting the city of Las Cruces, New Mexico has devised a new form of extortion: It will cut off water and related utility services to residents who don?t pay traffic tickets. Many of those citations were issued through red light cameras installed by the corrupt Australian corporation Redflex, which has built a huge industry out of such arrangements.  Shortly after announcing its ?Pay Up or Dry Up? extortion scheme, the Las Cruces City Government deployed police on a ticket-writing binge.

Last year, the same city government unveiled a program to seize the cars of people with unpaid tickets.  Las Cruces memorably vindicates St. Augustine?s description of government as a criminal gang that has granted itself impunity.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

April 27, 2012

In August 2011, a Columbia, Missouri police officer named Rob Sanders was caught on camera committing an act of undisguised criminal assault. Reacting to complaints from a pepper-sprayed detainee who didn?t have any water to rinse his eyes, Sanders bull-rushed the blinded, helpless ? and much smaller ? man, driving him against a wall with sufficient force to fracture his back.

Abuse of this kind is infuriatingly common. What happened next, however, is not: Columbia Police Chief Ken Burton, accurately describing Sanders?s act as an assault, fired the officer. [In firing Sanders, Burton overruled an internal review board that cleared Sanders of misconduct.] Now the local police union, the Columbia Police Officers Association, is seeking to remove Chief Burton.

The Columbia Police Department has built a well-earned reputation for corruption and abuse, and collected a number of plausible complaints of racial bias. When he was appointed Police Chief several years ago, Burton promised to reform the department, and he has actually made some modest tangible progress.

Local civil liberties activist Eapen Thampy points out that Burton was hired under questionable circumstances and has not been consistently rigorous in dealing with officer misconduct. The fact that his tentative efforts have precipitated a revolt says a great deal about the culture of privileged corruption he confronts.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

April 25, 2012

Krystal Rice was a married 22-year-old when she joined New York?s Jefferson County Sheriff?s Office. She was approached by a senior detective named Steven Cote, who enlisted her in what he described as a sting operation targeting online pedophiles.

Cote told Rice that he was maintaining an online profile in the name of a 15-year-old girl, and needed to take Rice?s photo to send to suspected predators who requested a picture.  Cote took Rice to a remote location and took several sexually suggestive photographs ? which, predictably, wound up being circulated in the office.

Rice?s husband didn?t approve, understandably, and this probably contributed to the break-up of their marriage. Once Rice was single, she began to receive vulgar text messages from Detective Cote, whose own marriage was disintegrating. When Rice filed a complaint, she was ostracized by other officers as a troublemaker. She has filed a lawsuit against Cote and several other officials in the sheriff?s office.

Lost in this controversy is this question: When a male detective posing as an underage girl creates a pornographic image of an adult woman, how is the consumer of that image ? however depraved he might be -- the real criminal in the transaction?

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

April 24, 2012

For a decade, the Pentagon and the CIA have been using remote-piloted drones to conduct lethal operations overseas. The Obama administration has escalated this robotic aerial war and expanded it to include the summary execution of U.S. citizens designated as terrorists by presidential order.

Last year, two drones operated by the Department of Homeland Security were deployed to help a rural sheriff arrest several members of a North Dakota family involved in a dispute over wandering cattle. Several major municipal law enforcement departments have begun to use drones as surveillance vehicles. Most of this hardware is paid for through grants issued by the Department of Homeland Security.

The Wall Street Journal reports that nearly 50 companies, eager for a share of this subsidized bounty, are developing 150 different models of remote-piloted drones. The Texas-based Vanguard Defense Industries offers the ShadowHawk drone. The company?s promotional literature boasts that the vehicle can ?provide complete surveillance of an area and engage suspects with buckshot, tear gas, grenades and less-lethal capabilities.? It can also be upgraded to serve as a fully realized weapons platform.

Obviously, we wouldn?t permit a foreign invader to deploy such weapons in our country. Why should we allow anyone to do so?

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

April 23, 2012 

The Michigan State Supreme Court has validated the right to resist unlawful actions by the police. In its April 20 decision in People v. Moreno, a 5-2 majority ruled that Angel Moreno, Jr. acted legally when he refused to allow the police access to his home without a warrant.

Moreno ordered the police to obtain a warrant and attempted to close the door. One officer shouldered the door open and assaulted Moreno, who was charged with resisting and obstructing police.

 In its ruling, the Court pointed out that ?the right to resist unlawful arrests, and other unlawful invasions of private rights, is well established in our state?s common law.? Until 2002, that right was explicitly recognized in state law. Although the resisting and obstructing statute has been modified, the majority continued, ?the Legislature expressed no intent to do away with the common-law right to resist an unlawful arrest.?

 The dissent advanced a very dangerous doctrine, insisting that ?the issue here is not whether the officers lawfully entered defendant?s house, but rather whether the officers were acting to further their employer?s ? interests.? From this perspective, citizens cannot resist any unlawful act by a police officer who is acting in the interests of the political elite that employs him.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

April 20, 2012

A recently minted principle of popular logic called ?Godwin?s Law? dictates that in any debate, the first person to compare his opponent to Hitler loses the argument. Facile analogies to Hitler and his National Socialist regime are quite commonplace, as are casual uses of the term ?Nazi? as a convenient insult.

Although we live in an age that eschews moral absolutes, Hitler is all but universally regarded as an icon of absolute, unqualified evil. Unfortunately, he is also regarded as unique ? a misunderstanding that has been deliberately cultivated and has done a great deal of damage.

During World War II, economist John T. Flynn published a valuable book entitled As We Go Marching that demonstrated how FDR?s New Deal regime was close kindred to those of Hitler and Mussolini. The true test of anti-Fascist convictions, Flynn wrote, was not the intensity of hatred for foreign practitioners of the doctrine, but a commitment to fighting the same trends here at home.

Flynn was haunted by the thought that once Washington had embraced corporatism and militarism, it would ?keep alive the fears of our people of the aggressive ambitions of other countries and ? embark upon imperialistic enterprises of [its] own."

Tragically, Flynn?s fears have proven to be entirely justified.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

April 19, 2012

The social artifact called the State is a mechanism of murder. This is a fact that we should remember every April 19.

On this date in 1993, the FBI slaughtered scores of people at the Mt. Carmel religious retreat outside Waco, Texas. This was the consummation of a 51-day siege that began with an unnecessary ? and illegal ? armed raid by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, an agency that exists without constitutional permission. That raid was carried out because of paperwork irregularities involving weapons purchases by David Koresh, the leader of a sect commonly called the Branch Davidians.

While Koresh?s theology was deranged and his conduct in some ways deplorable, he was not a criminal. He cooperated with the local Sheriff on many occasions, and was willing to work with the ATF. That agency preferred to stage a high-profile raid based on a defective search warrant. Four agents and several Branch Davidians were killed in that raid, setting the stage for the holocaust of April 19.

After the Davidians had repelled the illegal federal assault on their sanctuary, the Feds were determined to destroy them as an object lesson for the rest of us. In this atrocity we see the distilled essence of the government that rules us.

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