© 2000 by Claire Wolfe Artwork © 2000 by Nick Bougas
When, at the first large town, soldiers asked how they could distinguish between heretics and orthodox, the Cistercian [Abbot of Citeaux, leading the 13th Century crusade against the Albigensians] thundered: “Kill them all, God will know his own”1…
Seventy-five percent of the people in the Texas border town of Redford are narco-traffickers. It's a known fact. The town is hostile. If you see anyone there with a gun, he's probably a drug runner or a scout for drug runners.
At least, that's what the Marines were told.
So when four soldiers on a drug-interdiction patrol spotted 18-year-old goatherder, Esequiel Hernandez, one afternoon in 1997, they assumed the worst. When young Zeke -- an honor student and classic good boy -- raised his WWI-vintage .22 rifle and fired into the brush, they knew he was shooting at them. Never mind that they were 200 yards away, camouflaged by shaggy ghillie suits. Never mind that country boys herding goats shoot guns for many reasons, from playful plinking to varmint control. They knew. Zeke was a drug runner, a gunman. The Enemy.
The Marines never considered yelling, “Hey, kid! Cut it out, there are people out here!” They never considered shouting, “Drop your gun or we'll shoot!” They claimed the wind would have made it impossible to hear. Never mind that no one else noticed any wind that afternoon.
Marine Corporal Clemente Banuelos radioed that he was going to “take him” next time Zeke raised his rifle in their direction. He got a roger. And - after following Zeke for 20 more minutes as the boy moved away from the Marines hidden in the brush - they “took him.”
At least, that's what they said. The autopsy on Esequiel Hernandez indicated that he was facing away from the man they said he was aiming at. But never mind that - and never mind all the other discrepancies in the Marines' accounts of the shooting. A Congressional report2 found “mistakes” and “inadequacies in training.” Small matters like a wound on the wrong side of a body troubled them somewhat, but didn't seem obvious evidence of criminality. A grand jury found “no bill” against the shooter.
Oh, yes, the Justice Department and the Pentagon (whose joint operation it was) quickly paid the family of Esequiel Hernandez more than a million dollars. But no individual government agent paid any price for the shooting. The Drug War went on.
And so did the intimidation.
In the months after Zeke's killing, children weren't allowed out to play for fear of soldiers hidden in the gullies. Unmarked helicopters continued to buzz homes and herds. Nearly three years later, Father Mel LaFollette, retired Episcopal priest and neighbor of the Hernandez family, says, “I don't think anybody's hiding in their house…but there's still a great bitterness and suspicion. The military people have said they don't go on patrols anymore, but no one really believes that.
“Washington sent a new boss for the Marfa sector of the Border Patrol who is a public relations expert. He has at least made things a little smoother for the residents. They haven't been subject to the harassment they used to be - stopping the same person four or five times during a routine trip to Presidio for shopping - 16 miles away. Someone who might decide to walk a mile or two might be questioned over and over again. That has lessened, but I wouldn't say it doesn't happen any more. The word is out not to harass the natives too much. But a stranger comes through here at his own peril.”
He concludes: “We're kind of a lab experiment here on the border [for forces who want control], and if they succeed with us we'll live in a real police state instead of this partial police state.”3
“Police state,” however, is simply a modern term for an ancient form of terror. What's happening today in the name of a War on Drugs has happened before - an exercise of raw power and putrid corruption in the name of a “righteous” cause.
We can see through the ancient lies. Why is it so much harder to see through the lies that are brutalizing us today?
In the beginning it was a war against heretics
Pope Lucius II in 1184… laid down the penalties as exile, confiscation, and infamy (loss of civil rights):… Then came Innocent III, who…completed the foundations of the Inquisition by reaffirming, with heavier emphasis, that the bishops were not to wait for charges of heresy, but were to seek out heresy, or make an inquisitio. They were to have special officials, or “inquisitors,” for this purpose….Its birth is variously put by historians in 1229, 1231, and 1232. By the latter year, at all events, the Inquisition was established, and the hounds of the Lord felt the bloody rag at their nostrils.In the late twelfth century - with its crusades against the Eastern Infidel losing their appeal and profitability - the world's superpower, the Catholic Church - turned upon its own. Beginning with the crusade against the Albigensians of Southern France and continuing with the Inquisition, the Church began to root out, imprison, slaughter and seize property from “heretics” within its midst.
Indeed, the Church had a very real “heretic problem.” Millions secretly or openly held anti-Roman views, disgusted by Church corruption. This was insupportable to an institution whose power lay in its ability to dictate what people should think.
In the late twentieth century - with the Cold War losing its appeal and profitability (and its chief villain, the USSR) - the world's superpower, the United States government - turned upon its own. The federal government began to compete with the states to root out, imprison, slaughter and seize property from recreational drug users and sellers within its midst.
The government had a real “drug problem.” Millions were using recreational chemicals, as if what they put into their bodies was their own business. This was insupportable to an institution whose power increasingly lay in its ability to dictate how people should live.
Of course, in order to bring a violent anti-drug crusade into our living rooms without arousing alarm, the modern Inquisitors had to do exactly as their ancestors did. They first had to persuade us that:
Druggies are bad people who must be crushed at all cost
And the meanest thing of all is that [Catholic scholar] Canon Vacandard, and most of your modern…apologists, raise over the bones of those hundreds of thousands of murdered men, women, and children the smug and lying inscription that they were “dangerous to society.”The best estimates say that some 70 million Americans have smoked marijuana, that at least 18 million have smoked it in the last year.4 Millions have used other illegal recreational drugs. Perfectly ordinary people, the vast majority of them. Do some lead high-risk lives? Sure; so do mountain climbers and adulterers. Are some violent criminals? Sure; that's what happens when you legislate black markets.
Which is more dangerous? The drug or the war against it?
In a country where alcohol kills 150,000 per year and doctors kill hundreds of thousands - and where cocaine and heroin kill fewer than 5,000 combined and marijuana has never killed a single soul,5 we casually justify travesties like the one that hit Preston Mays on March 1, 1995, saying such people get what they deserve. Bust them all; God will know his own.
On that day, Mays, a poultry farmer with a ninth-grade education and a minor criminal history, was sitting in the living room of the home he rented to a woman acquaintance. The woman had called him to fix a broken sink at the property.
The renter left to run an errand, saying she would be right back. Hours passed, but she didn't return. Suddenly, he says:
They searched the house and found a pound of marijuana and two-and-a-half pounds of meth in a file cabinet after ripping it open… My tenant had been arrested shortly after leaving the house and told them her “boyfriend” (meaning me) “was still at the house and if there were any drugs there, they must be his because I have all mine with me.”
“None of my clothing was in the house,” Mays recounts. “Nor did I have keys to the doors… proved beyond a reasonable doubt that I had not shared that home. The lady I did live with at my farm 43 miles away testified too, so did my farm neighbor who belongs to the Highway Patrol… My prints weren't on anything, but still the good citizens of California that sat on that jury said I was guilty. Guilty because someone said that I was.”
He is now serving 24 years for possession with intent to distribute, 24 years for conspiracy and 10 years on charges related to guns found in the home. The woman with the drugs got 5½ years with a year off for treatment, rewarded for informing on this evil drug kingpin.6
Creating a society of informers
If he was denounced, he was guilty. Impossible, you say…But it is a truism. Listen to…Canon [Vacandard]: “If two witnesses, considered of good repute by the Inquisitors, agreed in accusing the prisoner his fate was at once sealed; whether he confessed or not, he was at once declared a heretic.” Trial by the Inquisition did not mean an examination to find out if a man was a heretic. If two secret witnesses said that he was, he was…As with the vague charge of “heresy” - which meant virtually anything persecutors and accusers wanted it to mean - it is unnecessary to have any actual evidence to get a drug conviction. Just create a society of informers.
On July 27, 1990, tractor-trailer driver Anibal Almanzar-Reyes was stopped by the DEA. He was hauling a truckload of onions. Just onions. No drugs. However, the friend who hired him to haul the load had told a DEA informant there would be drugs in the truck that day. The men were arrested on drug charges. Facing a long prison term, Almanzar-Reyes' friend turned on him, claimed the truck driver had knowledge of the drug-deal-that-didn't-happen, and offered to testify against him. An attorney, knowing his client had a previous drug conviction, advised making a plea-bargain - and Almanzar-Reyes got 14 years for driving a truckload of onions, while the friend who set him up earned a five year sentence for his cooperation.
Debbie Vineyard took a phone call from her husband's friend Rick, asking about a pair of cowboy boots. Debbie said they'd send the boots. “I had no idea,” she said later, “that this person Rick had just been arrested for drugs that he claimed to have received from my husband. Our phone conversation was recorded by the federal government…Rick evidently told the DEA that these cowboy boots were being sent with speed and heroin in them. After I was picked up, they searched my home and found the cowboy boots. They were stuffed full...of the daily newspaper. But, none of this mattered. I was still charged with Conspiracy to Distribute Methamphetamine (speed) and Aiding and Abetting.” Her 10-year federal sentence was later reduced to a “mere” five.
It seems that, today, a witness doesn't even have to be “of good repute” for his unsupported testimony to be considered evidence enough to send someone to prison. He must simply be unprincipled - or desperate - enough to rat out either the innocent or the guilty.
And what makes a man so desperate? Why, fear of the Inquisitors, of course - who hold the power to take his life or give a portion of it back, if he “cooperates.”
Using fear of punishment to get people to inform
Unless, therefore, a man had in him the rare stuff of a real martyr, he meekly acknowledged that he was a heretic, and he abjured the heresy. He was then required to denounce others, or “name his accomplices.” If he thus confessed his heresy and named a few others, he merely got a heavy penance… If he persisted in denying that he was a heretic, or refused to name others, he was taken into the next room.Zulima Buitrago, a single mother of two young children, was convicted for conspiracy to distribute cocaine. A friend's husband asked to use her garage to repair his truck. While there, he conducted a drug deal. Facing a life sentence unless he could implicate someone else, the man told police Buitrago had been present at the deal, where 350 kilos of cocaine had changed hands. Buitrago received a 24-year sentence, though there was not a shred of evidence - neither drugs nor money - to support the man's claim that Buitrago had been involved in a drug sale.
For some informants, of course, the motive is gold, not terror.
Using rewards to encourage informing
To all who would “take up arms,” as [Pope Alexander III] said, against [heretics] he promised two years' remission of penance and even greater privileges.Oscar Moncoda is serving 12½ years on drug charges, with the sole evidence against him being the testimony of an informant who was paid $80,000 for his testimony. He is not alone.
Traditionally, either fear of punishment or small payoffs have been used to get cooperation. But with law enforcement agencies becoming as rich as the Medieval Church with forfeiture money, they are now paying stunning sums. The street crook who still settles for $100 for selling his friends is a fool. And what would you do if you were a marginal type, always broke, who could “earn” several years' income in one swoop, simply by lying about someone you didn't care about or didn't even know?
But why on earth would a jury of 12 sensible people convict on such an absence of evidence?
Juries convicting on next to no evidence
Meantime the Inquisitors…had to choose an advisory council of “good and experienced men”…and come to a decision only in conjunction with these.A most beneficent provision, says the Jesuit! Actually the beginning of the jury-system in Europe, says the Canon! But who were these men, and what did they do? They were, as a rule, mostly priests and monks, with a few very orthodox laymen. In a few places quite a number of local pious lawyers - the decree stipulated that they must be “zealous for the faith”… The “jury” never hampered the Inquisitors.
Kevin B. Zeese, President, Common Sense for Drug Policy,7 writes of the aftermath of the Esequiel Hernandez shooting:
It also included the wife of a Border Patrol officer, a Border Patrol retiree, and two Customs Officers. The judge found no conflict of interest and District Attorney Valadez said it was good to have people on the jury who “knew how to get things done.”
Jeffrey Steinborn, a Seattle attorney who has been called “The Public's Defender,” commented on why juries are willing to convict in drug cases when the only evidence is the word of an informant, whose integrity may be completely compromised.
We've been made to fear the black man and his drugs or the Mexican and his drugs, the poor woman who smokes crack and ignores her child. Once you put them in that moral category, where they don't get the same treatment as your brother, the government can do anything to them.8
“On the rare occasion we win a case,” says Steinborn, “[The informant with something to gain] is what the juries seem to choke on. But the prosecutor says, 'Well, you know you're not going to get choir boys infiltrating this scum, you're not going to get priests infiltrating this scum.'” As another attorney, Terrance Geoghegan of Ventura, California, puts it, “We joke that the police wouldn't have arrested someone if he weren't guilty. But around here, people actually believe that.”
Of course in any Inquisition - conducted by the powerful for the interests of the powerful - there is a different standard for the sons of the powerful.
The privileged get off lightly
There were two kinds of prisons, strict and less strict. Rich heretics generally got the latter, and money will buy comforts and privileges in most places. But [even] they have, for a “heresy” which they have abjured, if it ever existed, lost all their property, seen wife and children reduced to beggary, and been imprisoned for life.Lonnie Lundy is serving life in prison without possibility of parole. He was never found with drugs, drug money, drug paraphernalia or anything else. His sentence is based on the word of one man (an employee he had fired years earlier), who later bitterly recanted, saying his testimony was concocted by the prosecution team.
Lundy's father contacted his U.S. Senator, Richard Shelby (R-Alabama), seeking help, but the Senator responded, “I'm sorry that your family has to go through this ordeal… But, any person who is caught with drugs [sic] should spend the rest of their life in prison. I have no sympathy for them.”
A few months later, in July 1998, Senator Shelby's son Claude landed at Atlanta's Hartfield Airport from London carrying 13.8 grams of hashish. Claude Shelby was also arrested. He received a misdemeanor possession charge and a $500 administrative fine. Senator Shelby later refused to respond to letters from Lonnie Lundy's father.
And do we even need to mention the sanctimonious Bush family, whose scion, George W., dismisses his own “youthful indiscretions” while (as governor of Texas) increasing minimum sentences for the “indiscretions” of less monied, less connected young people?
Money is more than a means of buying exemptions from punishment. Money is, at bottom, what keeps Inquisitions and crusades rampaging, long after their moral depravity has been exposed.
Forfeiture
[Pope Innocent III] was plainly sickened by the slaughter and the vile passions of his instruments, but he made vast material profit for the Papacy out of the monumental crime…In fine, these “confiscations” which Innocent III had recommended were becoming a very profitable source of revenue, and the Papacy wanted its share. The sordid scramble for gold amongst the bones of the dead had already begun.In the now-famous 1992 case of Donald Scott, Los Angeles County deputy sheriff Gary Spencer was unable to verify an informant's claim that Scott, a 61-year-old rancher, was growing marijuana on his Ventura County estate. However, Spencer did take the time to have the property appraised before conducting a raid. When he and his force of 30 (including agents from the U.S. Forest Service, the National Park Service, the DEA, the National Guard and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory) came crashing in to seize the 200-acre ranch, Scott - just awakened, naked and possibly drunk - came out of his bedroom with a gun. Spencer and another deputy shot Scott to death. There was no marijuana. The L.A. County sheriff and California Attorney General Dan Lungren both issued reports saying Spencer and his raiders had done nothing wrong. The Ventura County D.A. also found that the shooting was self-defense, but resoundingly declared that the prime motive for the raid was the law enforcers' desire to profit from Scott's ranch.9
Bringing suit against possessions
[According to Vacandard] torture was not regarded as a mode of punishment, but purely as a means of eliciting the truth.Torture is so vulgar, so passé. No one uses it any more in America - except, of course, for the occasional broomstick up the butt, or flick of a button on an electronic stun belt to make an uncooperative prisoner writhe on the floor screaming.10 Law enforcement agents now have a more sophisticated method for gaining the cowed cooperation of innocent and guilty alike. Civil forfeiture.
…When asked to justify the extraordinary powers granted to them by such laws, law enforcement officials find themselves invoking peculiar legal fictions that date back to feudal times or earlier, wherein inanimate objects are given life and then forfeited to the government for “their” criminal misconduct.11
Thus, rational people are asked to accept - without laughing or crying -- such legal cases as United States v. 9844 South Titan Court and United States v. $405,089.23 in U. S. Currency.
The motive for such uncivil treatment? As defense attorney Jeffrey Steinborn bluntly puts it:
And of course, the agencies making the seizures get part of the take.
No, the Drug War inquisitors rarely use torture. But now they don't even bother to wait for a guilty verdict before seizing everything the drug heretic owns. For many years 80 percent of all forfeitures have been done against people who are never even charged with any crime, let alone convicted.13 And make no mistake, this scramble for gold among the dead, the imprisoned and the merely terrified is highly lucrative. According to forfeiture expert, Leon Felkins:
Forfeiture is just one of several forms by which police agencies are being increasingly corrupted.
Militarization and corruption of police
Imagine the president of the United States informing the gunmen of Chicago - Christian knights in those days had no higher ethic - that he permitted them to invade and sack Los Angeles, Hollywood, and Pasadena, and you have something of a parallel.Dinuba, California (population 15,000) had just 12 cops. But, thanks to gifts of surplus submachine guns and combat gear - all courtesy of the federal government - half those cops got to play at being members of a Special Enforcement Team - their version of a SWAT squad. Not much going on in Dinuba, though. So they found something to occupy themselves. In 1997, hearing that a sawed-off shotgun used in an attempted murder might be in a certain home, they crashed through the door in the middle of the night, wearing black masks and cammies. Terrified, the 64-year-old farm worker who lived there grabbed a folding knife. Dinuba's finest machine-gunned him to death. The weapon they were seeking (which reportedly belonged to the man's son) was not in the house.15
The Dinuba debacle wasn't a drug case. But what happened there was a direct result of the federal Drug War. Not long ago, a quest for evidence would have brought a pair of uniformed policemen to the front door in broad daylight, knocking, explaining their mission, warrant in hand. No more.
In his New York Times article, “Crack's Legacy: Soldiers of the Drug War Remain on Duty,”16 Timothy Egan explains:
Special Weapons and Tactics squads, once used exclusively for the rare urban terrorist incident or shootout, transformed themselves through the crack years into everyday parts of city life….
Encouraged by federal grants, surplus equipment handed out by the military and seizure laws that allow police departments to keep much of what their special units take in raids, the Kevlar-helmeted brigades have grown dramatically, even in the face of plummeting crime figures.
“It is the militarization of Mayberry,” said Dr. Peter Kraska, a professor of criminal justice at Eastern Kentucky University, who surveyed police departments nationwide and found that their deployment of paramilitary units had grown tenfold since the early 1980s. “This is unprecedented in American policing and you have to ask yourself: What are the unintended consequences?”
Not only are police acting like soldiers, but thanks to Reagan and Bush, who weakened the Posse Comitatus law (that for more than a century had forbidden the military any role in U.S. law enforcement), soldiers are now entering police work - as they did in Redford, Texas.
In 1994, a survey of 300 U.S. Marines17 raised alarms with its finding that 26.34 percent of the respondents would unhesitatingly fire upon U.S. citizens if ordered to do so. But what's the problem? Presumably 100 percent of civilian police are willing to fire upon criminal American citizens. It's part of their job.
The problem isn't only who's doing the enforcing. It's attitude. Remember the old police motto, “Protect and Serve?” It's a far cry from the soldiers' “Kill 'em all; let God sort 'em out.” While “protect and serve” has always been, to some degree, a myth - ask anybody from Harlem, or any poor white trash boy - it's nevertheless been a guiding vision. Police have seen - and should see - themselves as part of the community. Not like this:
Of course, that's New York. Surely, the Dinuba, California's of the world are wising up? In fact, Dinuba did wise up. It had to. The family of the grandfather that Dinuba's play-SWAT boys killed won a $12.5 million federal judgment against the city - a figure more than twice the town's annual budget. Dinuba decided it didn't really need a military SWAT team after all.
But although some small cities have dumped their SWAT teams in the wake of lawsuits, others aren't getting the message. According to an AP report, October 10, 1999:
All this for a city whose only violent crime last year was a robbery.
And yes, the U.S. military - in the name of the War on Drugs - continues to hand local police helicopters, machine guns and training. In the wake of the Cold War, Congress, the White House and the Pentagon are also casting about for new duties for the United States' standing army.
What next?
The fearful massacres of the Albigensians…had by no means extinguished the rebellion. In 1241 and 1242, especially, the Inquisitors provoked such anger by their conduct that one of them was assassinated. The Pope compelled the Count of Toulouse to lead his troops against them, and the war or “crusade” was resumed.Every year or so, Congressman James Traficant (D-Ohio) proposes legislation that would station 10,000 U.S. soldiers on the Mexican border to keep out drugs and illegal aliens. In February 1999, he introduced HR 628, granting soldiers the authority to “prevent entry into the U.S.” by illegal aliens, drug traffickers and terrorists. The bill would also have authorized the military to inspect all vehicles and cargo entering the U.S. So far, Traficant's wishes have not made it intact into law, though they've found strong support in the House and have begun to creep piecemeal into Defense Department appropriations bills.
The Defense Department has done an analysis of what it would take to close the U.S./Mexico border. Their conclusion:
And this doesn't count logistical support. In a brilliant article, “War on Drugs: Military Perspectives and Problems,”19 analyst Joseph Miranda estimates that it would take nearly 500,000 soldiers simply to fulfill the Defense Department's own estimates. Then he goes on to show why those estimates are far, far too low.
Miranda's arguments are too complex to quote in detail here. His article is well worth reading by anyone concerned about the potential for Police State U.S.A. But in the end, Miranda concludes that a serious effort to close the border to drug trafficking would at least double the size of the current U.S. military and require maintaining that large a presence along the border, and in drug-supplying nations, in perpetuity. And that's without accounting for the extra force needed to fight the guerrilla warriors that would arise in rage against so crushing an occupying force.
Of course, no politician would dare propose that force today. No, you propose 10,000 to score political points today. And when 10,000 prove inadequate, you propose 100,000. And when 100,000 prove inadequate…
Unfortunately, it worked
If in those centuries there had been the same freedom as we enjoy, Roman Catholicism would…have shrunk long ago into a sect.The Inquisition is an indelible disgrace to the religion which created it;… in its procedure this holy court, presided over by the holiest of men, under the direct control of their holinesses the Popes, was the most infamous instrument of injustice and the worst fomenter of murderous cupidity that the world has ever seen.
Across the country, increasingly the public, church groups, think tanks and strong-minded officials (such as former San Jose police chief Joseph McNamara and New Mexico governor Gary Johnson) are waking up. They're speaking against the terror created in the War on Drugs. Some are crying for an emphasis on treatment instead of arrest. Some want limited legalization. Some say, hell, just decriminalize the stuff and get out of our way.
Yet the prison population continues to soar, as do arrests for the most harmless of drugs. According to the New York Times, someone in America is arrested every 20 seconds for a drug violation, and a new jail or prison is opened each week.20 In 1998, the FBI reported an all-time high number of marijuana busts - 682,885 nationwide.21 Eight-eight percent of those were for mere possession, not sale or cultivation. That's more than the number of arrests for murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault, combined.
Is there any sign that anyone in the federal government is listening?
On October 7, 1999, at the order of Congress, a new military command was born in Norfolk, Virginia. Its purpose: to expand the use of the military in domestic law enforcement even beyond the Drug War. Thanks to the latest exception to the Posse Comitatus Act, the military will now have a toehold in such broadly defined areas of domestic law enforcement as “terrorism,” “chemical weapons” and “cybercrime.”
Of course, the military's initial role is only “advisory” - just as we merely had military “advisors” in Vietnam, Waco and Redford, Texas.
Defense Secretary William Cohen told reporters, “The American people should not be concerned about [soldiers enforcing laws in their cities]. They should welcome it.”
But in an article by Jon E. Dougherty in WorldNetDaily, October 13, 1999,22 Gregory Nojeim, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington, D.C., put it more succinctly and accurately, “When the crisis hits, those with the biggest guns will be subordinate to no one.”
Oh, yes. The federal government is listening. To the Divine Will to Power - a force that echoes through the centuries with an ominous familiarity.
Notes