“Whoever threw that, that was beautiful!” exclaimed an armed thug after one of his comrades hurled a grenade into a prison enclosure. The scene, described by commentator David Kramer as something out of “Schindler’s List,” struck me as some perverse hybrid of Wounded Knee and “Jackass”: Armed adolescent bullies cackling with juvenile glee as they gun down desperate, defenseless people.

One wonders how many of these murderous mouth-breathers are now employed in domestic law enforcement. And then one wonders how many of these sadists had been employed as police before being called up by the Regime to serve as hired killers overseas. And that thought leads us irresistibly to the second video:

In 2003,  two years before the episode at Iraq’s Camp Bucca, riot police in Miami carried out a full-scale military assault — albeit with “non-lethal” weapons — against demonstrators who had assembled to protest a summit meeting promoting the artfully misnamed Free Trade Area of the Americas.

“After last week, no one should call what [Chief John] Timoney runs in Miami a police force,” observed investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill following the event. “It’s a paramilitary group. Thousands of soldiers, dressed in khaki uniforms with full black body armor and gas masks, marching in unison through the streets, banging batons against their shields, chanting, `back… back… back.’ There were armored personnel carriers and helicopters.”

Among the protesters was an attorney named Elizabeth Ritter. She was driven into the streets out of disgust that Miami had been turned into a garrison state. Wearing a modest, professional business suit, she marched in front of Timoney’s stormtroopers carrying a sign that read “Fear Totalitarianism.” As if to vindicate Ritter’s point, some of Timoney’s goons shot Ritter several times in the back and legs with rubber bullets. Ritter crouched down and covered her face with her protest sign — only to be shot again by a rubber bullet, which penetrated the sign and struck her in the forehead.

During the  next morning’s mission briefing,  black-shirted thugs commanded by Sgt. Michael Kallman of the Broward Sheriff’s Office of homeland security enjoyed a hearty laugh as they reviewed footage of the criminal assault on Ritter. This led to Kallman being captured in his own “Whoever threw that, that was beautiful!” moment.

“I don’t know who got her,” chortled Kallman, “but … it went through the sign and hit her smack dab in the middle of the head.”

“Can I get a little piece of her red dress?” chimed in one of Kallman’s cretinous underlings from somewhere off-camera.

In a conversation with Major John Brooks, the ranking officer at the briefing, another of the blackshirts showed off a bandana that he had retrieved “from one of the scurrying cockroaches.”

“Oh, cool!” exulted Brooks in a fashion worthy of a twelve-year-old. “This is going in my office forever, and it’s going to bring me some very good memories.”

Despite the fact that Miami’s Civilian Investigative Panel confirmed that police had committed criminal assaults during the protests, none of the costumed assailants responsible was punished in any way. In fact, the scenes described above were included in a training video, presumably used to instruct the Schutzstaffel in the proper use of what has come to be known as the “Miami Model” of homeland security.

 The foundation of the “Miami Model” is a doctrine of overwhelming force in the service of “order”: The Mundanes are told to submit or be hurt — or killed. This is the operative principle of every encounter between police and “civilians,” which is why every such encounter — even one incidental to emergency medical treatment at a funeral — is freighted with incipient police violence.

Hamilton Township, New Jersey — described by its municipal government as “America’s Favorite Hometown” — is a community of about 100,000 people. It is a reasonably affluent suburb blessed with abundant parks and other amenities — and blighted by a police force capable of busting up a funeral in a fit of official violence that wasn’t that far removed from the behavior of the torch-bearing Cossacks who raided the wedding in Fiddler on the Roof.

Earlier in the drama we had seen how Teyve, the Jewish milkman at the center of the story, was on friendly terms with the police chief. That friendship is savagely thrust aside once the chief’s “duty” is made clear to him.

“Orders are orders — you understand?”  simpered Anatevka’s village police chief to Tevye as the troops under his command carried out their pogrom. After all, the chief had been told by his superior, in no uncertain terms, that his job depended on his willingness to carry out orders: “If you don’t want to carry out orders, we will get someone else who will.” Such people are never in short supply.

We are told that many — nay, most — of those employed in police agencies are people of conscience and principle. This is true of several people I know who are thus employed. I sometimes suspect that I’ve met everybody who fits that description.

For reasons of institutional solidarity — or, what’s much the same thing, conformity achieved through the threat of retaliation — such worthy and decent police officers never seem to intervene in defense of innocent people being abused by their costumed comrades. In such instances, any effort made to de-escalate a situation involves admonitions to outraged Mundanes that they must “calm down” in the face of criminal violence being inflicted on a friend, loved one, or clearly inoffensive stranger.

As I’ve pointed out before, a police officer who actually intervenes to prevent criminal violence by a professional associate can expect to be cashiered immediately. The criminal offender himself, by way of contrast,  can expect a lucrative paid vacation while the local police union spares no effort to preserve his job. 

There was a time, not that long ago, when it was possible for Americans to avoid contact with the police, and the police were trained and expected to leave people alone. Now, however, police are permitted and encouraged to behave like packs of lupine predators, eager to exploit any opportunity to inflict themselves on the helpless.


It’s tempting to think that at some point some helpless American is going to become our nation’s Mohammed Bouazizi, or Khaled Said — a living (or recently deceased) symbol of resistance to the persistent, unpunished abuse inflicted by the Regime’s armed enforcers.

When he was three years old, Mohammad Bouazizi’s father died. As the oldest son of an indigent family living in Sidi Bouazid — a town about 160 miles from the Tunisian capital, Tunis — Mohammad was responsible to provide for his mother and two sisters. He earned a computer science degree, but found that it was of little use in Tunisia’s deeply depressed economy.

For years, Bouazizi managed to eke out a living as an unlicensed street vendor, peddling fruits and vegetables from a pushcart. Like others who carried out commerce without official permission, Bouazizi endured harassment from shakedown artists employed by the State, who in the course of the typical visit would steal the equivalent of seven dollars as a “fine.” 

As the song says, talk is cheap, but even nickels add up. Even a single nickel is sorely missed when it’s extracted at gunpoint from someone barely managing to earn enough to survive. But the contemptuous, arrogant words emitted by the armed functionary to carries out that theft do damage as well. The cumulative effect of such indignities can be enough to drive a despairing man to do desperate things.

He was driven to fatal despair when a municipal police officer confiscated his merchandise. 

The matter could have been cleared up if the officer had accepted the seven-dollar fine for operating an unlicensed merchant stand. But the sadist insisted on berating Bouazizi, slapping him, spitting in his face, and insulting his dead father. Heartsick with inconsolable despair, the young man set himself on fire. Public outrage over this incident grew into a revolt that eventually unseated the U.S.-supported incumbent dictator.

“What happened to him?” The police “happened” to him.

Khaled Said was a 28-year-old businessman from Alexandria, Egypt. Last June, after Said posted a video he had captured of narcotics officers divvying up the proceeds of a drug bust, he was dragged out of an internet cafe, taken to a nearby police station, and beaten to death. A small bag of hashish of the sort used by police everywhere to plant evidence was stuffed down Said’s throat.

News of this atrocity was quickly propagated throughout Egypt, engendering a protest movement that eventually grew into the rebellion at Tahrir Square and the still-unfinished effort to uproot Egypt’s deeply entrenched, U.S.-subsidized police state.

We don’t need you.

We don’t want you.

We don’t respect you.

We won’t tolerate you much longer.

Thanks so much to all of you who are helping to keep Pro Libertate on-line! God bless.

Dum spiro, pugno!