BLACK THURSDAY

Regardless of what happens with the Holder contempt vote, today will likely be remembered by freedom-loving people as Black Thursday. My response to a reporter a few moments ago: "You may call tyranny a mandate or you may call it a tax, but it still is tyranny and invites the same response."

"Hey, what's the address o' the Supreme Court? I wanna write 'em a nasty letter."

LATER: The other day I did an interview which will appear, I am told, on Monday. Here is a relevant portion of that which deals with the decision today.

Question: You said in an interview with the Washington Post that a handful of Americans “are armed and are capable of making such resistance possible and perhaps even initiating a civil war.” Would you support a civil war over health care law?

"Initiating a civil war" is a misquote. All of my work has been focused on preventing a civil war by making the clueless understand that one is possible. Their Weltanschauungs prevent it. I'm trying to get them to understand that we are in fact two countries now. We share a common language (most of us) and border, but we disagree on the critical question that the Founders answered with defensive violence against King George's violence -- shall the people serve the government of the government serve the people? Does it matter if we agree on traffic laws or the rules by which our kids play soccer if we disagree on something so fundamental? The health care law carries with its meeching platitudinous promises the hard steel fist of government violence at the center. If we refuse to obey, we will be fined. If we refuse to pay the fine, we will in time be jailed. If we refuse to report meekly to jail, we will be sent for by armed men. And if we refuse their violent invitation at the doorsteps of our own homes we will be killed -- unless we kill them first. It is Nancy Pelosi who first plunked the threat of violence on the table like Goering reaching for his revolver. How should principled, free people react to such threats? I am on record as advocating the right of defensive violence against a tyrannical regime. The Founders would agree. If someone on the street threatens to break into my house and steal my property or kill me, and I tell them, "If you do this, you will be killed," am I the violent one? Or is it merely good manners to warn the miscreant of the probable outcome?

I was once asked by a gun prohibitionist my thoughts on his desire for my disarmament. I began to explain as best I could and he cut me off with an impatient, "Give me the short answer." "Okay," I said after pausing briefly, "If you try to take our firearms we will kill you." He left quickly, muttering oaths about my sanity. Yet you will get the same answer from that other half of the country that such people make no attempt to understand, only deride and name-call. Such ignorance can get a whole lot of people killed. That is the point I'm trying to get across. If the Constitution as crafted by the Founders and the rule of law no longer applies, that is, if we now have the law of the jungle, then my half of the country is far better prepared to live and thrive in that jungle others force into than they are. Another formulation: If the rule of law no longer protects us from government tyranny, it no longer protects that tyranny and its acolytes from us. It is a two-way street and I hope desperately that Nancy Pelosi and her ilk understand that before it is too late.

Question: What are your thoughts about how the Supreme Court will rule on health care Thursday? What do you see as the potential implications of its decision?

See above. If the individual mandate is upheld, me and a few million of my friends will not comply and we will make ourselves so obnoxious in our refusal that sooner or later some government agent is going to try to kill us. Because the one thing a tyrant cannot tolerate is the example of someone being unafraid and saying "No." It's a bad example for the rest of the sheep and might encourage noncompliance. When that happens, you have only to read history to predict the outcome. To believe anything else is to whistle past the graveyard of history.

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An open letter to Andrew Traver on the occasion of his appointment to be Director of the ATF.

(NOTE: This letter was edited from its original posted form before mailing to Mr. Traver. The section on R.A. Bear was changed to reflect a more perfect understanding of the actual circumstances of the onset of the ATF's tail-chasing for Mr. Bear. See "The True Story of the Life of 'R.A. Bear': Inception & impregnation into the minds of the ATF via a highly placed snitch named Dan Shea of the NFATCA.")

An open letter to Andrew Traver on the occasion of his appointment to be Director of the ATF.

Dear Andy,

As the Internet commentator who scooped the rest of the media by announcing your pending appointment back in early July (obviously my sources within and without the ATF are far better than theirs), I would like to take this opportunity to discuss with you some unfortunate truths of the situation you will find yourself in when you take your seat as Director. You will by now have become familiar with my reputation as seen from the perspective of your former superiors on the fifth floor at ATF headquarters and Eric Holder and company at Main Justice. They do have their own opinions, informed mostly by their long, expensive, frustrating and ultimately futile search for a stuffed child's toy named R. A. Bear. You mustn't let all of their prejudices cloud your own judgment. For example, it is a demonstrated fact that my mother and father really were married.



But as "Uncle" Ho Chi Minh once cautioned, "Cherish your enemies for they teach you the best lessons." Try to think of me, for now at least, as your kindly, avuncular Uncle Mike, here to mentor you, to play Devil's advocate as it were, through the opening moves of the toughest job of your life. It is also in some ways the far most dangerous job you have ever undertaken -- and I mean that in all the senses of that word to every American all over the country. So I fervently hope that you will be smart enough to recognize the truth, regardless of whose mouth it comes from.

I'm sorry the administration apparently feels the need to sneak you in the back door by way of a recess appointment, but I'm sure that by now you're becoming aware of the many scandals that the boys at Main Justice don't want you asked about under oath -- and all it takes is one Senator who isn't on board to upset the entire apple cart.

This is not your fault, of course, though I understand that Main Justice was a bit concerned about a few specific details of your career at the long scandal-plagued Chicago Field Division.

No matter. You've jumped the bar and made it -- you are now the latest Acting Director of the ATF, if you keep track of them as they go by, as I do.

I always pay avid attention to the matter of who sits in your chair because up until now -- and at least until the IRS begins enforcing the "Health Care" mandate -- it has been the ATF of all the three-letter federal law enforcement agencies which has demonstrated by its mission and past talent for misadventure (Randy Weaver, Waco, David Olofson, etc.) the greatest aptitude for triggering the next American civil war. I have always taken a keen interest in understanding things that can make me suddenly and unexpectedly dead through no particular fault of my own save ignorance. For the same reason I keep track of neighborhood crime statistics, earthquake fault lines, tornado warnings, the behavior and habitat of poisonous snakes and the approximate location at any given time of my ex-wife so that I may give all of them a wide berth.

But of all of these threats to my existence it is the ATF which has drawn my consistent attention as the greater danger to my life, liberty and property.


Me and Paul Helmke. He tells me all his deepest, darkest secrets -- indirectly.

You know, Paul Helmke of the Brady Bunch is telling his citizen disarmament acolytes that you're "one of us" (them) and that they have every expectation that you are going to use the regulatory power of your new office to focus the entire weight of the ATF to enforce their agenda, even if it means bending or even breaking the law. You are, in their words, "going to push the outer edge of the envelope." Given your previous enthusiastic cooperation with the virulently anti-firearm rights Joyce Foundation, I can understand how they might think that even absent any back-channel conversations with you. They did their very best behind the scenes to get you where you are today so I can also understand how you might feel grateful enough to respond to their dangerous siren song.

And make no mistake, it IS dangerous -- very dangerous. As I wrote Eric Holder some time back when one of your agency's vindictive "economic Wacos" was threatening to turn deadly, there will be no more free Wacos. Don't take my word for it, but check with your analysts and with those of the FBI and CIA. Ask for a complete briefing paper on the Three Percent and the concept of "One Hundred Heads" introduced unexpectedly by an anonymous Marine Corps scout-sniper friend of mine.

These are unprecedentedly dangerous times and your agency has through arrogance, incompetence and both accidental and willful misadventure advanced its own front lines to the crumbling edge of an abyss. The advocates of citizen disarmament, wrongly believing that they have no skin in the game (that is, that they personally risk nothing by your obedience to their agenda) will be urging you to jump into that abyss, at the bottom of which is a ghastly civil war.

Please believe me when I say that it is in the vital interest of every American -- you, me, our children, everybody -- that you do not.

And it certainly need not come to that. Actually, you may be the right man in the right place at the right moment in history to avoid senseless, even unintended, violence on a vast scale.

Just as it took Nixon to go to China and Bill Clinton to accomplish welfare reform, you could take advantage of your unique position to reform the more dangerous habits of your agency.

Look, you know the culture and belief system of your agency as well as I know the culture and belief system of my friends. We call yours, with some justification we believe, "jack booted thugs." You call us "gun worshippers," "gun queers," "barrel suckers," and worse. We don't believe your agency has a constitutional basis to exist. Y'all don't believe that we have a right to question anything you order us to do, no matter how ill-considered, inconsistent or even malevolent it may be. Your employees, especially those of the Chief Counsel's Office, think it perfectly appropriate to misuse the power of their office to wreak havoc on innocent people's lives and families because of their political opinions. My folks think your folks could teach cockroaches some lessons about photo-phobia.

Mind you, even our folks understand that there are honest ATF street agents who chase real bad guys who commit real crimes. In fact, our understanding of your agency is far more informed and nuanced than you give us credit for, or indeed, far more than yours is of us. The ironic thing to those street agents is that they have as much trouble with the senior executive service (especially the Chief Counsel's Office) as they do with hardened criminals on the street and the sort of paperwork-chasing, agenda-driven investigations they are ordered into are really areas that they would prefer not getting into, for they believe such anti-firearm tail-chasing discredits the entire agency.

As the last election and numerous recent polls have demonstrated, belief in the legitimacy of the federal government and its power over the average citizen is at a modern nadir. Is this the fault of the people or the federal bureaucracy?

But it is not necessary to agree on the answer to that question to mutually understand that if the system is perceived by some to be illegitimate and hopelessly corrupt, that these people will take decisions based upon that belief -- decisions that could well lead to violence.

If as a result of studying recent outrages such as the railroading of David Olofson or the punitive "economic Waco" your agency has inflicted for years on Georgia firearms designer Len Savage in retribution for his testimony as an expert witness on behalf of defendants targeted by the ATF, we conclude that the agency is out of control and that -- even in federal court -- the rule of law no longer protects us, then surely you can understand our indifference to the notion that your position protects you.

In my own case, it was Special Agent Jody Keeku's framing of David Olofson which brought me off the benches and into the arena. If now your agency dislikes the results of my renewed attention to the darker recesses of their dungeons they have only Keeku and themselves to blame. To quote the American philosopher Frank Zappa: "Do you love it? Do you hate it. There it is, the way you made it." The Law of Unintended Consequences may be a bitch, but it is iron-clad and not subject to appeal or repeal, nor can it be manipulated, as your Chief Counsel's Office is so fond of doing, by unethical ex parte communication with federal judges.

And if the Founders' rule of law no longer obtains and it is merely naked power we are talking about -- that is to say, the law of the jungle -- then the hunter becomes the hunted and vice versa. Absent a mutual belief in the potency of the rule of law, the hitherto "law abiding citizen" must believe that such a corrupted system is merely a confidence game at his expense and if the law no longer protects him, then he must make his own arrangements. For if, after studying the Olofson case and others, we believe we no longer have the possibility of a fair trial in federal court, we still retain the right to an unfair gunfight with the ATF agents sent to our homes to arrest us on false charges.

That is where we are today. The question is, are you, Mr. Traver, going to reverse your agency's criminal drift under the shadow rule of the Chief Counsel's Office and execute the actual law in daylight under transparent rules and unambiguous regulations with verifiable testing procedures or are you going to embrace the Brady's citizen disarmament agenda and potential future violence?

Only you can answer that question.

On the off chance that you remember the oath you took to the Constitution when you first entered the service -- on the possibility that the law means more to you than an agenda provided to you by your putative sponsors -- in the hope that you are actually as honest and straightforward as you believe yourself to be -- I offer you below the results of my two decades study of the ATF. Just because I believe that your agency should be abolished doesn't mean that it is going to happen anytime soon. I live in the real world and see it with attentive eyes. So I offer these fixes in the interest of correcting the worst abuses of an agency I don't think should exist in the further interest of avoiding or at least postponing violence.

Even if you decide not to do a thing about any of these scandals, however, you should still study the list and possible solutions below. For even if you have no intention of correcting them, you will one day be called to testify under oath about them. Trust me. As sure as God made little green apples, the cockroaches of your agency are no longer in a position to avoid the antiseptic qualities of bright sunshine.

"Dans ce pay-ci, il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un admiral pour encourager les autres." "In this country it is good to kill an admiral from time to time, to encourage the others." -- Voltaire's Candide.

1. Deal with the Chief Counsel's Office incompetent shadow management of ATF. To paraphrase Shakespeare, "first thing you do is fire all the lawyers." For more than a decade the CCO has run ATF as a sorry parade of temporary management came and went. When a new acting director would come in, he would first turn to the guys who "knew stuff" at that rarefied level of ATF headquarters, the Chief Counsel's Office. Problem was, and is, they are not beyond setting up acting directors for a fall to further their own power and agenda (just ask poor Ken Melson) . Simply put, they don't like the competition that a director, a real director, gives them. You may simplify your life by firing anyone even tainted by the present CCO mafia and get some competent attorneys in there who feel bound by the law rather than an agenda. Being loyal to their oaths and to your direction wouldn't hurt either. In any case, the sight of incompetent and/or malevolent CCO lawyers being frog-marched out past the ruins of their government careers will certainly "encourage the others." Morale among the street agents will soar.

2. Once you have the CCO saboteurs out of the way. you can begin to deal with the sorry regulatory mess the ATF has been. First, understand that NONE of the databases your agency relies upon is without huge errors. The National Firearms Registry, the NFRTR, is particularly vulnerable to court challenge as demonstrated in the recent Freisen case. How is it, one must ask, that your agency continues to make new additions to the NFRTR every month when not a single new automatic weapon has been manufactured or imported since 1986? The answer of course is that the NFRTR is hopelessly faulty, and the additions that the ATF discovers in the process of inspections merely paper that over. YET PEOPLE GO TO PRISON BASED IN PART UPON THE NFRTR EVERY YEAR. How you fix this scandal absent another amnesty I do not know. It is your call, but you will continue to waste money on worthless prosecutions based upon it -- and wreck innocent lives -- if you continue to embrace the utter failure represented by the NFRTR.

3. If the ATF is to be an actual "law enforcement" agency, the rules and regulations must be both transparent and unambiguous and supported by verifiable testing procedures. As it stands, the ATF under the shadow rule of the CCO mafia has none of these. Part of this is the ambiguity of the laws you are called to enforce but most of it is simple bureaucratic inertia combined with the CCO desire to be able to argue either way in court, depending upon which they believe will be more likely to convict. The Firearms Testing Branch ought to promulgate clear written procedures that they can defend logically in court with scientific videotaped evidence that can be verified by independent experts. And their word, once given, should not be subject to tampering by enforcement agents, such as happened in the matter of David Olofson, when SA Jody Keeku sent his rifle, which had been determined to be a malfunctioning semi-automatic rifle by FTB back for "further testing" under conditions that guaranteed uncontrolled and dangerous full auto fire. Absent any effective challenge or verification, testing becomes subject to mere agenda-driven opinion and agency convenience, yet through its unchallenged presentation in court becomes law without any basis in demonstrable fact. This is a perversion of science, logic and law. To the extent that you let this scandal fester, the ATF will continue to be despised as a mere force operating under color of law and not a law enforcement agency. Happily you have the perfect man to accomplish this in Deputy Director Melson, for forensics testing and standards are his main meat. Absent the malevolent meddling of the current CCO mafia and given the clear authority to do so, he could probably set this part of your house in order without too much trouble.

4. More so than the NFRTR, the contradictory regulatory Gordian knot that the agency has tied itself in over definitions and lengths of destructive devices and pistol grip shotguns will have to be dealt with. Should you do an amnesty followed by a demand of forfeiture or registration of millions of hitherto unregulated shotguns currently in the hands of law-abiding citizens? Boy will that make a whole bunch of NRA members mad. The NRA management might even be forced out of its symbiotic, go-along to get-along mindset. And if you don't? Why, the Brady folks who now shower you with kisses will cover you with curses, because for them it is not about the law but the agenda -- their agenda. Either way you go, you will discredit your agency with SOMEBODY. Good luck with that.

5. Critics of the agency's missteps are not "enemies of the state." People who try to defend themselves against baseless charges are not legitimate targets for regulatory retribution. You should put a stop to all "economic Wacos" now in progress and forbid any more manipulation of enforcement to avoid embarrassing questions or even uncomfortable legal blow-back for CCO misdeeds. Stop the Don Corleone culture and attempt to make whole the damage it has inflicted on their victims. It is not a crime to be an effective expert witness against the ATF in federal court, nor should gun dealers be targeted for their political opinions. Until the law becomes more important than the agenda to the ATF, your agency will continue to pose a danger to itself and to the peace of the country.

6. The street agents are smarter than the muckety-mucks of the senior executive service, regardless of their pay grade. When the ill-considered Waco raid's cover was blown, it was a street agent who warned that the raid shouldn't proceed. He was ignored, to great loss of life. No one was inconvenienced for that deadly blunder, nor did their ATF careers suffer, unless you count the conscientious agent. To the extent that you give the street agents your own personal leadership and your own personal accountability, your people will take care of you. This is Leadership 101 and common sense, but it has been sorrowfully scarce in all of your recent predecessors. You should also understand that almost all whistleblowers are not bureaucratic traitors but merely honest folks trying to save the agency from the darker demons of the senior executive service's nature. Figure out a way to expedite the resolution of their complaints instead of trying to hide them and you'll be the darling of both parties on the Hill. It may run contrary to all agency history and bureaucratic reflexes, but it is nonetheless true.

ATF "Person of Interest": CPT R.A. Bear, Intelligence Officer, Dogtown Rangers Militia, in one of his many disguises.

7. The cultivation and pressuring of informants, including those at the highest levels of industry associations such as the NFATCA, is doing your agency more harm than good when it is driven not by actual police work in furtherance of the law but by the desire on the part of CCO to root out and make unwarranted criminal cases against people they view as "poisonous weasels." This agenda-driven corruption of the process opens the ATF up to self-discrediting errors such as that represented by R.A. Bear. As best I understand the beginning of the story, the CCO wanted to "get" an honest man whose only "crime" had been to defy them in court. To that end they put pressure on all their snitches to come up with anything. One highly-placed informant, apparently on the hook legally and under pressure himself from the ATF, gave them a name: R.A. Bear, the stuffed child‘s toy of the daughter of another man who the informant despised. What consideration the informant got for providing the name is unknown except to him and your agency. From that point Mr. Bear took on a life of his own, a process which I was honored to assist in. We gave him friends, a life history, we paged him at gun shows and machine gun shoots and, on the orders of the CCO, your agents scurried hither and yon, chasing each and every clue and always coming up empty. CCO lawyers demanded to know about him in discovery depositions, always to be told truthfully under oath, "I know of no such person as R.A. Bear." Now, one day soon, R.A. Bear will be present at a congressional oversight hearing, with full explanation from other witnesses under oath as to how he came to be the focus of an ATF bear hunt. If you want to prevent another such long, expensive, foolish and utterly self-discrediting trackdown at taxpayer expense, you should buy stuffed toy bears and send one each ATF employee this Christmas, as a reminder that when their agenda gets in front of the law and even common sense, you are not going to reward them for it.


8. Finally, your agency and other agencies in the federal government pay the Southern "Poverty" Law Center big bucks for "hate group" orientation. Stop it. They are by now very rich liars for money ($200M plus in assets and the 2009 IRS paperwork of SPLC indicates even a Cayman Islands account), and although they have provided political cover to your agency at critical points in the ATF's history, such as the Good O' Boys Roundup scandal, they are so factually challenged that any "intelligence" they provide nowadays is worthless. You are paying good taxpayer money to propangandize your employees with their agenda. And, as my Michigan farmer Grandpa used to say, they "don't know shit from shinola." I ask you, if we were actually as morally contemptible, intellectually challenged and cartoonish as they portray us with their conflationary propaganda -- or even if we really were just "gun queers" and "barrel suckers" -- could we have successfully made R.A. Bear real and had your agency chasing a stuffed child's toy for the better part of two years?

This gets back to old Uncle Ho's adage, "Cherish your enemies for they teach you the best lessons." The old murdering communist is burning in Hell, but he was right about that. If we are to avoid unwanted violence during your tenure as ATF Director, it is important that we see each others positions clearly and move, when we move, slowly and carefully. And keep your hands where we can see 'em.

Remember in every decision you make that there are now no more free Wacos and the Law of Unintended Consequences still trumps every best-laid plan.

But if you can get your traditionally agenda-driven cowboy agency actually under control and operating according to law, it will go a good way to minimizing the chance of an accidental discharge leading to the next American civil war.

With hope, but not much faith, I look forward to your tenure as ATF Director.

Good luck.

You're going to need it.

In fact, we all are.

Mike Vanderboegh
The alleged leader of a merry band of Three Percenters.

OK, I missed this dirty copulating lie by Time about the Three Percent.

Barton Gellman

Thanks to those of you who pointed this graph out that I missed.

And yet there are exceptions, and law-enforcement officials say domestic terrorists are equally the products of their movements. Those most inclined toward violence sometimes call themselves three percenters, a small vanguard that dares to match deeds to words. Brian Banning, who led local and interagency intelligence units that tracked radical-right-wing violence in Sacramento County, California, says, "The person who's interested in violent revolution may be attracted to a racist group or to a militia or to the Tea Party because he's antigovernment and so are they, but he's looking on the fringe of the crowd for the people who want to take action."

My email response to the author:

TO: Barton Gelman, Time Magazine
angler@rushpost.com

RE: Your dirty, copulating lie about the Three Percent.

I note in your article on militias shot through with elision and conflation that you have this line:

"Those most inclined toward violence sometimes call themselves three percenters, a small vanguard that dares to match deeds to words."

Really? Can you name one Three Percenter who has committed a crime of violence? What "deeds" do you refer to? Broken windows in a few political party offices? This is your justification for linking us to the domestic terrorism referred to in the rest of the paragraph? Does petty political vandalism against property and property alone now constitute domestic terrorism?

And how do you write an article without exploring the provocation by a tyrannical federal government that prompts the rise in the number and activity of constitutional militias? This is not a "conspiracy theory," as the bureaucratic functionaries of the previous Democrat administration proved on a number of occasions. Many of those same people, notably Eric Holder, are now positions of even greater authority than before. This is why I wrote the Attorney General a letter entitled, "No More Free Wacos." They had their free Waco in the 90s. No one was ever disciplined for the massacre of 80 men, women and children. The constitutional militias are a reminder that when the rule of law no longer protects the people, it no longer protects their oppressors either.

Ancient history, you may say. But the way we look at it, in the present day it was Nancy Pelosi and her ilk who first brought the threat of violence to the table by plunking down the pistol of mandatory "health care" on the table. If we refuse out of principle to participate in this unconstitutional tyranny, we will be fined. If we refuse to pay the fine, at some point we will be ordered to be arrested. If we refuse to be arrested on our doorsteps at the point of an IRS agent's gun, we will be killed -- all in the interest of our "health."

That is the logical progression, is it not? Ask Vicki Weaver or the Davidians if you can find any yet alive. It was this threat that prompted me to call for the breaking of the windows of local headquarters of Pelosi's predatory party. Given that Pelosi would use the entire paramilitary police force of the federal leviathan to force us to her will, a few windows broken in warning seem to me to be simple manners.

I also note that you quote me in your article though you did not trouble your lazy, royal editorial ass to seek an interview with me, though I am the founder of the Three Percent movement. Neither did you quote Professor Robert Churchill, whose book, To Shake Their Guns in the Tyrant's Face is the definitive history of the militia movement up to the year 2000.

A simple visit to my blog, http://sipseystreetirregulars.blogspot.com, would have shown you that although it is true that we insist that we will not accept any further infringements on our liberty, we are also insistent that the federal government be the agent to fire the first shot. The sentiment "No Fort Sumters, No Oklahoma City Bombings" is woven through all of my writing and into the credo of the Three Percent. Does that sound to you like a call to pro-active deadly violence?

I rather suspect that your lie about us was handed to you by one of the federal "authorities" quoted (by name or anonymously) in your story, and being the sloppy/lazy "journalist" common to your breed, you simply plugged it in there without verification. Doesn't Time do fact-checking any more?

I will take the Feds seeming fear of the Three Percent as a complement, but I insist upon a formal retraction from you and your magazine.

Mike Vanderboegh
The alleged leader of a merry band of Three Percenters.
PO Box 926
Pinson, AL 35126
GeorgeMason1776@aol.com

Murdered Citizens, Dead Cops and Assassinated Judges: Judicial Support of Police Tyranny and the Law of Unintended Consequences.

Dead Tiger: The King of the Jungle adjudged by the twin Laws of the Jungle and of Unintended Consequences and found wanting.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. -- Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.

Just another day at work for America's militarized police:

A Tucson, Ariz., SWAT team defends shooting an Iraq War veteran 60 times during a drug raid, although it declines to say whether it found any drugs in the house and has had to retract its claim that the veteran shot first.

And the Pima County sheriff scolded the media for "questioning the legality" of the shooting.

Jose Guerena, 26, died the morning of May 5. He was asleep in his Tucson home after working a night shift at the Asarco copper mine when his wife, Vanessa, saw the armed SWAT team outside her youngest son's bedroom window.

"She saw a man pointing at her with a gun," said Reyna Ortiz, 29, a relative who is caring for Vanessa and her children. Ortiz said Vanessa Guerena yelled, "Don't shoot! I have a baby!"

Vanessa Guerena thought the gunman might be part of a home invasion -- especially because two members of her sister-in-law's family, Cynthia and Manny Orozco, were killed last year in their Tucson home, her lawyer, Chris Scileppi, said. She shouted for her husband in the next room, and he woke up and told his wife to hide in the closet with the child, Joel, 4.

Guerena grabbed his assault rifle and was pointing it at the SWAT team, which was trying to serve a narcotics search warrant as part of a multi-house drug crackdown, when the team broke down the door. At first the Pima County Sheriff's Office said that Guerena fired first, but on Wednesday officials backtracked and said he had not. "The safety was on and he could not fire," according to the sheriff's statement.

SWAT team members fired 71 times and hit Guerena 60 times, police said.

In a frantic 911 call, Vanessa Guerena begged for medical help for her husband. "He's on the floor!" she said, crying, to the 911 operator. "Can you please hurry up?"

Asked if law enforcement was inside or outside the house, she told the operator, according to a transcript of the call, that they were inside. "They were ... going to shoot me. And I put my kid in front of me."

A report by ABC News affiliate KGUN found that more than an hour had passed before the SWAT team let the paramedics work on Guerena. By then he was dead.

A spokesman for Sheriff Clarence Dupnik said he could not discuss whether any drugs had been found at the home or make any other comment. "We're waiting for the investigation to be complete," he said.

In a statement, the sheriff's office criticized the media, saying that while questions will inevitably be raised, "It is unacceptable and irresponsible to couch those questions with implications of secrecy and a coverup, not to mention questioning the legality of actions that could not have been taken without the approval of an impartial judge."

In recent days the increasingly out-of-control federalized paramilitary police mini-armies that currently rule over the cities, towns and hamlets of the United States have won important court victories in Indiana, New Mexico and in the Supreme Court, that validate their ability to engage in unrestricted criminality against innocent citizens under color of law. It doesn't take god-like perfect prognostication to understand that these decisions by the black-robed Mandarins who look out for the interests of the "Ruling Class" at the expense of the "Country Class" will lead to more murdered citizens, and, in short order, dead cops and assassinated judges.

In Indiana:

People have no right to resist if police officers illegally enter their home, the Indiana Supreme Court ruled in a decision that overturns centuries of common law.

The court issued its 3-2 ruling on Thursday, contending that allowing residents to resist officers who enter their homes without any right would increase the risk of violent confrontation. If police enter a home illegally, the courts are the proper place to protest it, Justice Steven David said.

"We believe ... a right to resist an unlawful police entry into a home is against public policy and is incompatible with modern Fourth Amendment jurisprudence," David said. "We also find that allowing resistance unnecessarily escalates the level of violence and therefore the risk of injuries to all parties involved without preventing the arrest."

Justices Robert Rucker and Brent Dickson strongly dissented, saying the ruling runs afoul of the U.S. Constitution's Fourth Amendment against unreasonable search and seizure, The Times of Munster reported.

"In my view the majority sweeps with far too broad a brush by essentially telling Indiana citizens that government agents may now enter their homes illegally -- that is, without the necessity of a warrant, consent or exigent circumstances," Rucker said.

At least one Indiana sheriff has concluded that if in his opinion he "needs" to conduct random searches, he will.

In New Mexico:

The New Mexico Supreme Court has ruled that police can seize visible guns from vehicles without a warrant.

The ruling overturned district and appeals court decisions that said police had overstepped their authority in searching a vehicle after a lawful traffic stop.

At issue was a 2008 case in Hobbs. Police saw a handgun in the vehicle and then searched it.

They ran a background check and found that a passenger, Gregory Ketelson, had a prior felony conviction. Officers arrested him for being in unlawful possession of a gun.

Ketelson's lawyers argued that an officer does not have authority to enter a car and seize an object absent a search warrant consent or emergency circumstances.

In overturning the lower courts, the Supreme Court said the key issue was whether a police officer could remove a visible weapon from a vehicle to keep it away from those who had just been pulled over.

The court unanimously said: "... We are mindful of the grave need for officer safety in the midst of the dangers and uncertainties that are always inherent in traffic stops. ... It was constitutionally reasonable for the officer to remove the firearm from the vehicle. Therefore, the evidence should not have been suppressed."

The Artesia NM News reports:

The court also said that its decision “does not depend on any requirement of particularized suspicion that an occupant is inclined to use the firearm improperly.”

And nationally, the Supreme Court ruled

The police do not need a warrant to enter a home if they smell burning marijuana, knock loudly, announce themselves and hear what they think is the sound of evidence being destroyed, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday in an 8-to-1 decision.

The issue as framed by the majority was a narrow one. It assumed there was good reason to think evidence was being destroyed, and asked only whether the conduct of the police had impermissibly caused the destruction.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., writing for the majority, said police officers do not violate the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches by kicking down a door after the occupants of an apartment react to hearing that officers are there by seeming to destroy evidence.

In dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote that the majority had handed the police an important new tool.

“The court today arms the police with a way routinely to dishonor the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement in drug cases,” Justice Ginsburg wrote. “In lieu of presenting their evidence to a neutral magistrate, police officers may now knock, listen, then break the door down, never mind that they had ample time to obtain a warrant.”

The case, Kentucky v. King, No. 09-1272, arose from a mistake. After seeing a drug deal in a parking lot, police officers in Lexington, Ky., rushed into an apartment complex looking for a suspect who had sold cocaine to an informant.

But the smell of burning marijuana led them to the wrong apartment. After knocking and announcing themselves, they heard sounds from inside the apartment that they said made them fear that evidence was being destroyed. They kicked the door in and found marijuana and cocaine but not the original suspect, who was in a different apartment.

Taken together these decisions will further embolden the paramilitary gangs that operate under color of law such as the one in Pima County, Arizona, that executed Jose Guerena on a blanket warrant for an entire neighborhood.

I have written before ("“Choose this day whom you will serve.”: An Open Letter to American Law Enforcement) of the dangers of federalized law enforcement -- to the people, the Republic and the cops themselves.

In addition, the Olofson case and other similar cases have convinced many that if we no longer possess the right to a fair trial, we at least retain the right to an unfair gunfight.

I have said this many times and it bears repeating:

If the law -- the entire police establishment at all levels of government, the high priesthood of attorneys and the courts who are supposed to restrain them within the limits set by the Founders' Constitution as well as the politicians who shape the legal battlefield -- no longer protects us then it no longer protects them either.

There is no advantage in being law abiding in an essentially lawless society where the rule of law has been supplanted by the rule of man, which is nothing more than the law of the jungle.

For in the jungle, even the biggest predators can be killed without consequence. The only thing that matters then is the successful completion of the deed by the creature who refuses to be eaten without resistance.

Are these black robed fools really stupid enough to think that the immutable, eternal Law of Unintended Consequences does not apply to THEM?

I'm afraid were are going to see that theory tested in a very bloody manner, with murdered citizens, dead cops and assassinated judges littering their self-made jungle's floor.

"The 'Rule of Law' is dead, but the 'Rule of Man' should take no comfort from it."

Law of the Jungle: Eat or be eaten.

Folks,

I happened across this op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by Mary Anastasia O'Grady. She asks a good question. You will find my emailed answer to her at the bottom.

Mike
III

JULY 6, 2009

Honduras at the Tipping Point

Why is the U.S. not supporting the rule of law?

Hundreds of emails from Hondurans flooded my in-box last week after I reported on the military's arrest of President Manuel Zelaya, as ordered by the Supreme Court, and his subsequent banishment from the country.

Mr. Zelaya's violations of the rule of law in recent months were numerous. But the tipping point came 10 days ago, when he led a violent mob that stormed a military base to seize and distribute Venezuelan-printed ballots for an illegal referendum.
All but a handful of my letters pleaded for international understanding of the threat to the constitutional democracy that Mr. Zelaya presented. One phrase occurred again and again: "Please pray for us."

Hondurans have good cause for calling on divine intervention: Reason has gone AWOL in places like Turtle Bay and Foggy Bottom. Ruling the debate on Mr. Zelaya's behavior is Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez, who is now the reigning international authority on "democracy."

Mr. Chávez is demanding that Mr. Zelaya be reinstated and is even threatening to overthrow the new Honduran president, Roberto Micheletti. He's leading the charge from the Organization of American States (OAS). The United Nations and the Obama administration are falling in line.

Is this insane? You bet. . .

Predictably, Washington's endorsement of the flawed electoral process was a green light. Mr. Chávez grew more aggressive, emboldened by his "legitimate" status. He set about using his oil money to destabilize the Bolivian and Ecuadorean democracies and to help Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega and Argentina's Cristina Kirchner get elected. Soviet-backed Fidel Castro was able to intimidate his neighbors in the 1960s and '70s, and Mr. Chávez has done the same thing in the new millennium. This has given him vast power at the OAS.

Hondurans had the courage to push back. Now Chávez-supported agitators are trying to stir up violence. Yesterday afternoon airline service was suspended in Tegucigalpa when Mr. Zelaya tried to return to the country and his plane was not permitted to land. There were reports of violence between his backers and troops.

This is a moment when the U.S. ought to be on the side of the rule of law, which the Honduran court and Congress upheld. If Washington does not reverse course, it will be one more act of appeasement toward an ambitious and increasingly dangerous dictator.

Subject:"Rule of Law" is dead, but "Rule of Man" should take no comfort from it.
Date: 7/6/2009 8:54:59 A.M. Central Daylight Time
From: GeorgeMason1776
To: O'Grady@wsj.com

re: Your question, Why is the U.S. not supporting the rule of law in Honduras?
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124683595220397927.html

Ms. O'Grady,

If this administration is busy killing the rule of law in this country (and it is), why should we expect anything less in its foreign policy? The "Rule of Law," madam, is dead. However, the "Rule of Man" should take no comfort from its competitor's demise. In the chaos that will ensue, both within and without our country, the Obamanoids will discover that if the law no longer protects the least of us, it does not protect the Mandarin class either. If power and power alone is now the rule of the day, and eat or be eaten the mantra, the previously law-abiding can develop an appetite as well, if only in self-defense. And there are very many more of us than there are of them. Scant comfort it will be to the international victims of our deceit who wrongly trusted us and to our swiftly dying Republic.

Mike Vanderboegh
PO Box 926
Pinson, AL 35126
GeorgeMason1776@aol.com

Scaring the white folks, again. (Hide the children.)

Barkley Rosser, liberal economist, sneers at John Lott's "More Guns, Less Crime" thesis here, entitled "Gun Nuts Exposed at Distorting Data and Results."

A snippet --

In the latest Econ Journal Watch, just out, Ian Ayres and John J. Donohue III have a paper, "Yet another refutation of the more guns, less crime hypothesis - with some help from Moody and Marvell" . . .

I am not doing their paper justice, but the media discussion is often dominated by Lott and his allies who are now pushing for loosened gun laws in Virginia, and are counting on Dems laying low and not challenging their incessantly repeated claims that such gun law relaxations reduce crime. They should not lay low. The claims are baloney and lies, based on distorted date and misrepresentations of results from ones with better data.

The comments back and forth are often silly and Say Uncle rightly calls this, "I know you are, but what am I?"

In a reply on both Barkley's and SayUncle's sites I endeavour to "scare the white people" again. I entitle my response:

How many economists (with their social scientist dates) can dance on the head of a gun control pin?

The fascinating thing about intellectuals is that they actually believe that their trench warfare over footnotes and data actually MEANS anything in the grand scheme of things as we are faced with today.

All of your snarky arguments are about to be overwhelmed by events. Either the society collapses under the economic tidal wave that is about to hit (in which case those who have firearms will no doubt survive better than those who eschew them, and the armed will be ill-disposed to obey any scheme that works toward their disarmament) or the Obamanoids will proceed with AWB2 and the federal seizure of control over all private transfer of arms (the ill-named lie called "the gunshow loophole") thus sparking armed civil disobedience if not outright civil war.

In the first event, you left-wing academics are either going to be stew for the cannibal's pot, or pulling plows for those who are armed.

In the second, those who advocate citizen disarmament of the "gun nuts" are going to be hiding in deep cellars and caves from those people who, having lost family members to a predatory government, will be using Bill Clinton's Serbian rules of engagement to wipe out the political, media and intellectual underpinnings of that tyrannical regime.

In any case, your footnotes will be used for kindling.

Kinda makes you want to go buy a firearm, doesn't it? Better hurry, before they're all gone.

Mike Vanderboegh
sipseystreetirregulars.blogspot.com


LATER: I also posted this response at another science blog out of Australia, Tim Lambert's Deltoid. There, I was presented with this remarkably cogent and well reasoned rebuttal:

Shorter Mike Vanderboegh:
I don't care if you're right or wrong, because I has gunz!!!!!!
Posted by: bi -- IJI | January 22, 2009 12:06 PM

To which I replied:

And you were trying to be insulting with that, right?

Put another way: "When Democracy Turns to Tyranny, I STILL Get to Vote." People may vote with their feet (as in leaving deadly "citizen disarmament zones" like the liberal-conrolled cities or states for places where gun ownership is cherished), with their wallets (as in the Great Obama Gun Rush) or, if all else fails, with their rifles.

You know, calling us "gun nuts" and advocating that our liberty and property be taken from us does not endear you to us. If the Obamanoids decide that they can twist the meaning of the Constitution and the laws so that they no longer protect us, then they can hardly quibble if we decide that the law no longer protects THEM either. Nor will they protect you, come to that.

For 75 years we have been pushed back by the federal government in the free exercise of our right to arms. Each time we backed up grudgingly. Now some of us have decided that we will no longer back up -- that if the administration draws the line of the law behind where we now stand, we will resist. And we will do so at the muzzles of our rifles if necessary.

We don't want to tell you how to live, we merely wish to be left alone. You can sneer at us, revile us, call us names, but you cannot deny (unless you are as ungrounded in reality as you accuse us of being) that we are here, we are armed and we are not going away quietly.

Now, you can either accept that, or you can try doing what has always worked for you in the past. If you do the latter, we will introduce you to the Law of Unintended Consequences. It is the the statute that kicks in when all the other laws have been knocked flat.

Or, as my Grandpa Vanderboegh told me: "Don't poke a wolverine with a sharp stick, boy, unless you want your balls ripped off."

All of the intellectual argument between Lott and his critics, in the end, is spit in the wind. Don't poke the wolverine. Good advice. It remains to be seen if y'all are smart enough to recognize it.

Mike Vanderboegh Pinson, AL

OK, OK, I'll get back to Absolved now.

A message that Eric Holder understands perfectly well: No more free William Colbys.

William Colby when he was CIA station chief in Saigon.

"But I'm a superstitious man. And if some unlucky accident should befall him - If he should get shot in the head by a police officer, or if he should hang himself in his jail cell - or if he's struck by a bolt of lightning, them I'm going to blame some of the people in this room, and that I do not forgive." -- Don Vito Corleone to the other dons of the Five Families, The Godfather.

In a comment to a previous post on "Zorro" I indicated that there would be "No more free William Colbys" either. I see from my email that this requires some explication.

In an article on the controversy about the Waco FLIR tape and the evidence that FBI or Delta shooters were killing Davidians as they fled the fire out the back of Mt. Carmel (See Mike McNulty's two documentaries on Waco -- Waco: The Rules of Engagement and Waco: A New Revelation), Texas-based lefty journalist Dick Reavis discusses Gordon Novel and how the Davidian defense counsel received the assistance of William Colby, former director of the CIA.

Shortly after Novel claims a team sent by Colby helped him with the FLIR tape analysis, his body washed up on the banks of Maryland's Wicomico River after he had been missing for nine days. The Baltimore, MD medical examiner's office in Baltimore concluded that the seventy-six-year-old Colby had fallen out of his canoe as the result of a heart attack or stroke, suffered hypothermia, and drowned.

Colby had a summer home in Rock Point, Maryland on the banks of the Wicomico River, a tributary of the Potomac. April 27, 1996 was a cold, blustery night, an odd time for Colby, who was 76, to go canoeing for the winds were gusting up to 25 miles per hour.

Colby's canoe was spotted the next day on a sand bar -- without Colby.

A US Coast Guard investigator who searched Colby's home said that Colby had left his radio and computer on when he went canoeing, saying "There were dinner items on the table." The house was unlocked.

Colby was alone in the house that night, for his wife was visiting her mother in Texas. There are differing press accounts of what Bill Colby told his wife in a phone call earlier in the evening:

The Associated Press reported that Colby told her he didn't feel well but was going canoeing anyway--The Guardian reported that he phoned his wife to say he was going to eat dinner, take a hot shower, and hit the sack. A third newspaper account stated Colby told his wife he wasn't feeling well and yet went canoeing nonetheless, but the article didn't state whether or not Colby conveyed to wife that he was going canoeing.

The day Colby's canoe was found Coast Guard crews started to search the Wicomico for his body. The Coast Guard ultimately scoured the river for eight days with divers, sonar equipment, and drag-lines, and dogs rummaged the river's banks--Colby's body was never recovered. Then on May 6, Colby's body washed ashore close to where his canoe had originally been spotted--it's odd that Colby's body materialized so close to the canoe even though the Coast Guard had scoured the vicinity with divers, sonar, and drag lines.

The Associated Press reported that Colby's body was clad in khaki pants, a blue and white shirt, and a red windbreaker, but he wasn't wearing shoes. So if the Associated Press' account of Colby's canoeing apparel was accurate, and the Maryland medical examiner's account was accurate, Colby went canoeing on a cold, blustery night without shoes--it was cold enough for him to wear a windbreaker and yet he opted not to wear shoes.

Missing from the account was his life jacket. He wasn't wearing one, despite the fact that his wife insisted that he never went out on the water without one, the result of his experiences in the OSS during World War II.

Now Gordon Novel is not the most veracious of witnesses. Yet Mike McNulty verified that Novel did have help of some kind with the FLIR analysis, and it is certain (I have been told by someone who is familiar with both the men and the case) that Gordon Novel and the CIA of the William Colby era were, as he claimed, "a mutual admiration society."

Certainly Novel had acted as a cut-out in the CIA's secret war with the FBI for years, and he both despised and was despised in turn by agents of the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

I have personally confirmed that Colby and Novel knew each other. Certainly Bill Colby had been involved in a lot of controversies -- both seen and unseen -- over his career and thus had made a lot of enemies. So if he was killed -- as seems likely to me -- then the list of suspects is a long one.

But his list of friends was long as well, and it happens that I have known a couple of them over the years and neither of them believed that Bill Colby died in a canoe accident.

But even if the list of enemies is long, and you're working your search for suspects backward from the date of Colby's death, the first thing you notice is that last people that Bill Colby both pissed off and frightened -- a bad combination -- were the Clintonistas responsible for the Waco massacre and its cover-up.

I do know this: the man I received information about Andreas Carl Strassmeier from -- the Virginia driver's license and Social Security number provided him by Vincent Petruskie, a CIA employee -- the information that pulled me into the private investigation of the OKC bombing, was a friend of Bill Colby's and he was perfectly happy to embarrass the Clintonistas and the FBI through the cut-out of an Alabama militia leader.

And it wasn't just the Waco tape that placed Colby on the White House mortal enemies' list. At the time of his death, Bill Colby was still a world-traveler and consultant to many corporations. He had recently became an editor of a financial newsletter, Strategic Investment, which covered the Vince Foster "suicide" in detail.

Its editors hired three renowned handwriting experts to investigate Foster's suicide note, which hadn't been found when his briefcase was first searched, but later materialized, torn into pieces, with no fingerprints on any of the pieces. Upon comparing this document with others of Foster's writings, these experts declared it was a forgery, and a not very good one at that.

So, the Clintonistas had good reason to want him dead.

I tell you all of this to get to this point:

When we become concerned that the Clintonista cover-up artists of the 90s (one of whom is now the nation's "top cop", Eric Holder) might take retaliatory actions against the several ATF whistleblowers who are now threatening to make that agency's many scandals an item of public discussion, it is important to remind them that we are in a new day.

Just as there will be no more free Katrinas and no more free Wacos, just as there will be no more free Oklahoma Citys and no free stolen elections, there will be no more free Bill Colbys.

They understand exactly what I'm talking about, even if some of you, gentle readers, do not.

So if the Holder crowd -- the Obamanoid Clintonista Cabal -- is tempted to fall back on old habits and make the "Zorros" and the "Waldos" who threaten the exposure of their wrongdoing go away in a traffic "accident" or while canoeing they had best understand one thing up front -- There will be no more FREE William Colbys either.

Unfortunately these are the kinds of unpleasant topics which must be discussed when the "cops" are in fact criminals themselves. If the rule of law no longer protects the people, it no longer protects criminals operating under color of law either.

So, if you are an "official" scofflaw, it is still safer to mend your ways and to stick to the rule of law, even if you and your administration are both embarrassed by it. Better to be embarrassed than terminally embarrassed.

Mike
III

Reality Sinks In. An Open Letter to the Whiner Known as ATF Director B. Todd Jones.

 

 "Cherish your enemies for they teach you the best lessons." -- Ho Chi Minh.

6 October 2013

Dear Mr. Jones,

I don't suppose I need to introduce myself, as my sources report you are quite aware of who I am - at least in the context of the Fast and Furious scandal - and my ATF and DOJ files are several feet thick by now, reflecting my opposition to militarized federal law enforcement over the past twenty years.

It has been more than two years since you were named Acting Director of the ATF. At the time, sources of mine in DC characterized you as a political stooge, with one long-time DC observer saying:

My reaction is that the bag here is too mixed to be effective, and to constitute effective reform, with McMahon and Newell sitting where they are. It compromises too much; reflects the relative lack of power that Todd Jones has; and reinforced the notion he's a political stooge. I hope that I'm wrong about this, but it is what I think --- it is nowhere near the housecleaning that needs to be done.

Perhaps the baldest hypocrisy is leaving ATF Counsel intact --- because that's ultimately where most if not all of the problems originate; and those that didn't originate there, got fed and nurtured by the ATF Counsel thugs.

At the time I thought I would send a letter of friendly advice to you, much as I did to Chicago Gang favorite Andy Traver back in November 2010.   (In fact, it is remarkable as I re-read it now, how much of this advice still holds true despite two years of your tenure.)  Here, in part, (along with a quote from Voltaire) is what I told Traver then:

"Dans ce pay-ci, il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un admiral pour encourager les autres." "In this country it is good to kill an admiral from time to time, to encourage the others." -- Voltaire's Candide.

1. Deal with the Chief Counsel's Office incompetent shadow management of ATF. To paraphrase Shakespeare, "first thing you do is fire all the lawyers." For more than a decade the CCO has run ATF as a sorry parade of temporary management came and went. When a new acting director would come in, he would first turn to the guys who "knew stuff" at that rarefied level of ATF headquarters, the Chief Counsel's Office. Problem was, and is, they are not beyond setting up acting directors for a fall to further their own power and agenda (just ask poor Ken Melson) . Simply put, they don't like the competition that a director, a real director, gives them. You may simplify your life by firing anyone even tainted by the present CCO mafia and get some competent attorneys in there who feel bound by the law rather than an agenda. Being loyal to their oaths and to your direction wouldn't hurt either. In any case, the sight of incompetent and/or malevolent CCO lawyers being frog-marched out past the ruins of their government careers will certainly "encourage the others." Morale among the street agents will soar.

Of course Traver never made it even to a recess appointment, so big was his anti-firearm rights baggage.  Then they turned to you.  Like I said, I thought about sending you a similar letter -- for about thirty-two and one-half seconds. I wrote then, "It would be a waste of time for he is, as my DC friend commented, merely a 'political stooge' placeholder playing a game of musical chairs with no odd man out, played for the benefit of the idly curious television cameras and temporarily concerned Congresscritters. It is Kabuki theater, signifying nothing."  My other thought was, "Give him time.  We'll see what he's made of."

In the past two years you have shown us, and I must say the picture is neither flattering nor reassuring.  Other sources who have known you over the years characterized you as vindictive to subordinates and slavishly obedient to superiors saying you were "The Nuremberg Man" who would "kill his own mother if he was ordered to."  Harsh?  Certainly, within a year it was evident that not only were you not interested in getting to the bottom of the Fast and Furious cover-up, you were part of the cover-up yourself.  As John Solomon reported in July of last year:

The federal prosecutor brought in to reform the embattled Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in the aftermath of the Fast and Furious gun scandal distributed a videotaped message to employees this month warning there would be “consequences” for reporting wrongdoing outside their chain of command.

The video, obtained by the Washington Guardian, immediately raised alarm among agents in the field, members of Congress and whistleblower advocates

“Choices and consequences means simply that if you make poor choices, that if you don’t abide by the rules, that if you don’t respect the chain of command, if you don’t find the appropriate way to raise your concerns to your leadership, there will be consequences,” Acting Director B. Todd Jones told the employees in a video distributed July 9 by email and closed-circuit TV and obtained by the Washington Guardian.

The 3 minute, 22 second videotape was the last of eight “Changecasts” that Jones distributed to ATF employees in recent weeks to describe how he planned to run the agency, improve morale and instill a new culture in the aftermath of one of the agency's worst scandals.

ATF officials in Washington and rank-and-file agents told the Washington Guardian that the tape was interpreted by many as a warning not to pursue the path of the Arizona agents who went outside the agency in 2011 and reported concerns to Congress about the bungled Fast and Furious gun probe that let semiautomatic weapons flow to Mexican drug gangs.

Of course once caught, you immediately crawfished, denying that you had intended to intimidate anyone. The whistleblowers were not reassured.  At the time, your words made the cover story of the Fall 2012 edition of The Agent, the official publication of the National Association of Federal Agents.   In fact, as you well know, the cover showed a photo of an immensely ugly toad, with your threat in a cartoon bubble above it.  This was, of course, a reference to your nickname earned long ago in certain federal law enforcement circles, "The Toad," or sometimes rendered as "B. Toad Jones."

Shortly after that, you complained publicly that you were "under the microscope" and that running ATF was 'Testing All Of My Skill Sets.'  At the time I thought, "What a whiner."  Now appears a story indicating that if anything your whining has grown more shrill:

When President Barack Obama picked B. Todd Jones to lead the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, it looked like the moment had arrived when the beleaguered ATF would reassert itself as an agency with teeth. . . It didn't work out that way.  One by one, the bills failed. Support for expanded background checks fizzled. Jones' nomination sat idle for eight months before the Senate finally confirmed him.  Two months into his tenure, Jones is stuck between a White House with high expectations for curbing gun violence and a Congress that has little appetite for strengthening his agency.

"The debate going on in this town right now makes it real clear to anyone who's got a mind and is forward-looking and not living day to day that the resources are going to be diminished," Jones said. "We're also going to have to and have been doing more with less. We're not right-sized, we're not resourced. . ."

During his confirmation hearing, Jones acknowledged that ATF was "very much in distress." Repairing that hasn't been easy so far.

The ATF was among the many federal agencies rushing to the Washington Navy Yard last month when a Navy contractor killed 13 people and terrorized his office building with a sawed-off shotgun.

Tracing guns is the ATF's responsibility. But in the first high-profile investigation since being confirmed, Jones saw the FBI snub his agents and trace the shotgun itself. Neither agency has commented on the situation.

Also, late last month the Justice Department's inspector general issued a scathing report on the agency's handling of cigarette smuggling cases between 2006 and 2011. The report concluded ATF mismanaged undercover operations, lost track of millions of cigarettes and misused some of the $162 million in profits from the investigations.

The conclusions recalled the missteps of the failed operation "Fast and Furious," in which the ATF allowed gun-runners to buy weapons in hopes of tracking them and disrupting Mexican gun smuggling rings. The ATF lost track of the guns. . .

The legacy of "Fast and Furious" continues haunts the agency today, to Jones' frustration.  "I'm tired of ... constantly being flogged for mistakes," he said. "There's much, much more that we've done right that that public never hears about than the snafus that they do hear about."

You mean snafus like Operation Fearless in Milwaukee? By the way, did y'all ever get that machine gun you had stolen back? Guess not. You know I'm reminded of the reproof Super Chicken gave to his trusty sidekick Fred the Lion whenever something would go wrong: "You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, Fred."

 None of this is very pleasant for you to read, of course, but as "Uncle" Ho Chi Minh once cautioned, "Cherish your enemies for they teach you the best lessons."  So let me, if I may, go back over some of the advice I gave to Andy Traver, for it seems that nothing has changed in the past two years.

I always pay avid attention to the matter of who sits in your chair because up until now -- and at least until the IRS begins enforcing the "Health Care" mandate -- it has been the ATF of all the three-letter federal law enforcement agencies which has demonstrated by its mission and past talent for misadventure (Randy Weaver, Waco, David Olofson, etc.) the greatest aptitude for triggering the next American civil war. I have always taken a keen interest in understanding things that can make me suddenly and unexpectedly dead through no particular fault of my own save ignorance. For the same reason I keep track of neighborhood crime statistics, earthquake fault lines, tornado warnings, the behavior and habitat of poisonous snakes and the approximate location at any given time of my ex-wife so that I may give all of them a wide berth.

But of all of these threats to my existence it is the ATF which has drawn my consistent attention as the greater danger to my life, liberty and property.  The Chief Counsel's Office, as you may know, is hard-wired through unofficial communication channels to the most avid of the citizen disarmament advocates in this country -- the Brady Bunch, CSGV, Senators Feinstein and Schumer -- and your lawyers (and I daresay your bosses Holder and Obama) pay attention to the dangerous siren song they sing.

And make no mistake, it IS dangerous -- very dangerous. As I wrote Eric Holder some time back when one of your agency's vindictive "economic Wacos" was threatening to turn deadly, there will be No more free Wacos. Don't take my word for it, but check with your analysts and with those of the FBI and CIA. Ask for a complete briefing paper on the Three Percent and the concept of "One Hundred Heads" introduced unexpectedly by an anonymous Marine Corps scout-sniper friend of mine who one day back in 2009 sent me this personal card:

Sir,

I have read you on the internet and believe in what your doing. One day the ATF will come to count coup on you and take your head. I promise to take One hundred heads for yours.

Cheyenne 0317/8541

As a former Marine you may recognize the MOS numbers of a scout-sniper, someone with the the "skill set" (as you put it) to actually take those one hundred heads.  (I also suggest for your edification and amusement the introduction to my novel Absolved: Tyrants beware. 4th Generation Warfare: How the next civil war will be fought.) As I wrote to Andy Traver:


These are unprecedentedly dangerous times and your agency has through arrogance, incompetence and both accidental and willful misadventure advanced its own front lines to the crumbling edge of an abyss. The advocates of citizen disarmament, wrongly believing that they have no skin in the game (that is, that they personally risk nothing by your obedience to their agenda) will be urging you to jump into that abyss, at the bottom of which is a ghastly civil war.

Please believe me when I say that it is in the vital interest of every American -- you, me, our children, everybody -- that you do not. And it certainly need not come to that.

Traver never made the grade.  You did.  Now you are stuck with something that I daresay you didn't know when you accepted it, other wise you would have run screaming in the other direction.  Even so, you may be the right man in the right place at the right moment in history to avoid senseless, even unintended, violence on a vast scale.

Just as it took Nixon to go to China and Bill Clinton to accomplish welfare reform, you could take advantage of your unique position to reform the more dangerous habits of your agency.

You may by now have a more informed opinion of  the culture and belief system of your agency as well as I know the culture and belief system of my friends. We call yours, with some justification we believe, "jack booted thugs." You call us "gun worshippers," "gun queers," "barrel suckers," and worse. We don't believe your agency has a constitutional basis to exist. Y'all don't believe that we have a right to question anything you order us to do, no matter how ill-considered, inconsistent or even malevolent it may be. Your employees, especially those of the Chief Counsel's Office, think it perfectly appropriate to misuse the power of their office to wreak havoc on innocent people's lives and families because of their political opinions. My folks think your folks could teach cockroaches some lessons about photo-phobia.

Mind you, even our folks understand that there are honest ATF street agents who chase real bad guys who commit real crimes. In fact, our understanding of your agency is far more informed and nuanced than you give us credit for, or indeed, far more than yours is of us. The ironic thing to those street agents is that they have as much trouble with the senior executive service (especially the Chief Counsel's Office) as they do with hardened criminals on the street and the sort of paperwork-chasing, agenda-driven investigations they are ordered into are really areas that they would prefer not getting into, for they believe such anti-firearm tail-chasing discredits the entire agency.

As numerous recent polls have demonstrated, belief in the legitimacy of the federal government and its power over the average citizen is at a modern nadir. Is this the fault of the people or the federal bureaucracy?

But it is not necessary to agree on the answer to that question to mutually understand that if the system is perceived by some to be illegitimate and hopelessly corrupt, that these people will take decisions based upon that belief -- decisions that could well lead to violence.

If as a result of studying recent outrages such as the railroading of David Olofson or the punitive "economic Waco" your agency has inflicted for years on Georgia firearms designer Len Savage in retribution for his testimony as an expert witness on behalf of defendants targeted by the ATF, we conclude that the agency is out of control and that -- even in federal court -- the rule of law no longer protects us, then surely you can understand our indifference to the notion that your position protects you. 

In my own case, it was Special Agent Jody Keeku's framing of David Olofson which brought me off the benches and into the arena. If now your agency dislikes the results of my renewed attention to the darker recesses of their dungeons they have only Keeku and themselves to blame. To quote the American philosopher Frank Zappa: "Do you love it? Do you hate it. There it is, the way you made it." The Law of Unintended Consequences may be a bitch, but it is iron-clad and not subject to appeal or repeal, nor can it be manipulated, as your Chief Counsel's Office is so fond of doing, by unethical ex parte communication with federal judges.

And if the Founders' rule of law no longer obtains and it is merely naked power we are talking about -- that is to say, the law of the jungle -- then the hunter becomes the hunted and vice versa. Absent a mutual belief in the potency of the rule of law, the hitherto "law abiding citizen" must believe that such a corrupted system is merely a confidence game at his expense and if the law no longer protects him, then he must make his own arrangements. For if, after studying the Olofson case and others, we believe we no longer have the possibility of a fair trial in federal court, we still retain the right to an unfair gunfight with the ATF agents sent to our homes to arrest us on false charges.

That is where we are today. The question is, are you, Mr. Jones, going to reverse your agency's criminal drift under the shadow rule of the Chief Counsel's Office and execute the actual law in daylight under transparent rules and unambiguous regulations with verifiable testing procedures or are you going to embrace the Brady's citizen disarmament agenda and potential future violence?

Only you can answer that question.

On the off chance that you remember the oath you took to the Constitution when you first entered the service -- on the possibility that the law means more to you than an agenda provided to you by your putative sponsors -- in the hope that you are actually as honest and straightforward as you believe yourself to be -- I offer you below the results of my two decades study of the ATF. Just because I believe that your agency should be abolished doesn't mean that it is going to happen anytime soon. I live in the real world and see it with attentive eyes. So I offer these fixes in the interest of correcting the worst abuses of an agency I don't think should exist in the further interest of avoiding or at least postponing violence.

Even if you decide not to do a thing about any of these scandals, however, you should still study the list and possible solutions below. For even if you have no intention of correcting them, you may well one day will be called to testify under oath about them. Even with your anti-whistleblower policies, the cockroaches of your agency are no longer in a position to avoid the antiseptic qualities of bright sunshine.


I have already mentioned the first priority of purging the Chief Counsel's office (you might want to pay particular attention to the ruinous career of that poisonous weasel James P. "Little Jimmy" Vann).   Here are the other suggestions I had for Mr. Traver:

2. Once you have the CCO saboteurs out of the way. you can begin to deal with the sorry regulatory mess the ATF has been. First, understand that NONE of the databases your agency relies upon is without huge errors. The National Firearms Registry, the NFRTR, is particularly vulnerable to court challenge as demonstrated in the recent Freisen case. How is it, one must ask, that your agency continues to make new additions to the NFRTR every month when not a single new automatic weapon has been manufactured or imported since 1986? The answer of course is that the NFRTR is hopelessly faulty, and the additions that the ATF discovers in the process of inspections merely paper that over. YET PEOPLE GO TO PRISON BASED IN PART UPON THE NFRTR EVERY YEAR. How you fix this scandal absent another amnesty I do not know. It is your call, but you will continue to waste money on worthless prosecutions based upon it -- and wreck innocent lives -- if you continue to embrace the utter failure represented by the NFRTR.

3. If the ATF is to be an actual "law enforcement" agency, the rules and regulations must be both transparent and unambiguous and supported by verifiable testing procedures. As it stands, the ATF under the shadow rule of the CCO mafia has none of these. Part of this is the ambiguity of the laws you are called to enforce but most of it is simple bureaucratic inertia combined with the CCO desire to be able to argue either way in court, depending upon which they believe will be more likely to convict. The Firearms Testing Branch ought to promulgate clear written procedures that they can defend logically in court with scientific videotaped evidence that can be verified by independent experts. And their word, once given, should not be subject to tampering by enforcement agents, such as happened in the matter of David Olofson, when SA Jody Keeku sent his rifle, which had been determined to be a malfunctioning semi-automatic rifle by FTB back for "further testing" under conditions that guaranteed uncontrolled and dangerous full auto fire. Absent any effective challenge or verification, testing becomes subject to mere agenda-driven opinion and agency convenience, yet through its unchallenged presentation in court becomes law without any basis in demonstrable fact. This is a perversion of science, logic and law. To the extent that you let this scandal fester, the ATF will continue to be despised as a mere force operating under color of law and not a law enforcement agency.

4. More so than the NFRTR, the contradictory regulatory Gordian knot that the agency has tied itself in over definitions and lengths of destructive devices and pistol grip shotguns will have to be dealt with. Should you do an amnesty followed by a demand of forfeiture or registration of millions of hitherto unregulated shotguns currently in the hands of law-abiding citizens? Boy will that make a whole bunch of NRA members mad. The NRA management might even be forced out of its symbiotic, go-along to get-along mindset. (Note: they didn't oppose YOUR nomination now did they?)  And if you don't? Why, the Brady folks who now shower you with kisses will cover you with curses, because for them it is not about the law but the agenda -- their agenda. Either way you go, you will discredit your agency with SOMEBODY. Good luck with that.

5. Critics of the agency's missteps are not "enemies of the state." People who try to defend themselves against baseless charges are not legitimate targets for regulatory retribution. You should put a stop to all "economic Wacos" now in progress and forbid any more manipulation of enforcement to avoid embarrassing questions or even uncomfortable legal blow-back for CCO misdeeds. Stop the Don Corleone culture and attempt to make whole the damage it has inflicted on their victims. It is not a crime to be an effective expert witness against the ATF in federal court, nor should gun dealers be targeted for their political opinions. Until the law becomes more important than the agenda to the ATF, your agency will continue to pose a danger to itself and to the peace of the country.

6. The street agents are smarter than the muckety-mucks of the senior executive service, regardless of their pay grade. When the ill-considered Waco raid's cover was blown, it was a street agent who warned that the raid shouldn't proceed. He was ignored, to great loss of life. No one was inconvenienced for that deadly blunder, nor did their ATF careers suffer, unless you count the conscientious agent. To the extent that you give the street agents your own personal leadership and your own personal accountability, your people will take care of you. This is Leadership 101 and common sense, but it has been sorrowfully scarce in all of your recent predecessors. You should also understand that almost all whistleblowers are not bureaucratic traitors but merely honest folks trying to save the agency from the darker demons of the senior executive service's nature. Figure out a way to expedite the resolution of their complaints instead of trying to hide them and you'll be the darling of both parties on the Hill. It may run contrary to all agency history and bureaucratic reflexes, but it is nonetheless true.

ATF "Person of Interest": CPT R.A. Bear, Intelligence Officer, Dogtown Rangers Militia, in one of his many disguises.

7. The cultivation and pressuring of informants, including those at the highest levels of industry associations such as the NFATCA, is doing your agency more harm than good when it is driven not by actual police work in furtherance of the law but by the desire on the part of CCO to root out and make unwarranted criminal cases against people they view as "poisonous weasels." This agenda-driven corruption of the process opens the ATF up to self-discrediting errors such as that represented by R.A. Bear. As best I understand the beginning of the story, the CCO wanted to "get" an honest man whose only "crime" had been to defy them in court. To that end they put pressure on all their snitches to come up with anything. One highly-placed informant, apparently on the hook legally and under pressure himself from the ATF, gave them a name: R.A. Bear, the stuffed child‘s toy of the daughter of another man who the informant despised. What consideration the informant got for providing the name is unknown except to him and your agency. From that point Mr. Bear took on a life of his own, a process which I was honored to assist in. We gave him friends, a life history, we paged him at gun shows and machine gun shoots and, on the orders of the CCO, your agents scurried hither and yon, chasing each and every clue and always coming up empty. CCO lawyers demanded to know about him in discovery depositions, always to be told truthfully under oath, "I know of no such person as R.A. Bear." Now it is hoped that R.A. Bear will be present at a congressional oversight hearing, if the GOP ever finds its spine (perhaps in the run-up to the 2014 midterms I am now being told) with full explanation from other witnesses under oath as to how he came to be the focus of an ATF bear hunt. If you want to prevent another such long, expensive, foolish and utterly self-discrediting trackdown at taxpayer expense, you should buy stuffed toy bears and send one each ATF employee this Christmas, as a reminder that when their agenda gets in front of the law and even common sense, you are not going to reward them for it.  (By the way, if you don't believe me, just ask Little Jimmy Vann -- he knows ALL about Ramsey A. Bear.)


8. Finally, your agency and other agencies in the federal government pay the Southern "Poverty" Law Center big bucks for "hate group" orientation. Stop it. They are by now very rich liars for money ($200M plus in assets and the 2009 IRS paperwork of SPLC indicates even a Cayman Islands account), and although they have provided political cover to your agency at critical points in the ATF's history, such as the Good O' Boys Roundup scandal, they are so factually challenged that any "intelligence" they provide nowadays is worthless. You are paying good taxpayer money to propangandize your employees with their agenda. And, as my Michigan farmer Grandpa used to say, they "don't know shit from shinola." I ask you, if we were actually as morally contemptible, intellectually challenged and cartoonish as they portray us with their conflationary propaganda -- or even if we really were just "gun queers" and "barrel suckers" -- could we have successfully made R.A. Bear real and had your agency chasing a stuffed child's toy for the better part of two years?  Could we have exposed the Fast and Furious scandal?  Vectored the Senators' staffs to the whistleblowers?  Linked up the whistleblowers with honest media folks like Sharyl Attkisson of CBS?

This gets back to old Uncle Ho's adage, "Cherish your enemies for they teach you the best lessons." The old murdering communist is burning in Hell, but he was right about that. If we are to avoid unwanted violence during your tenure as ATF Director, it is important that we see each others positions clearly and move, when we move, slowly and carefully. And keep your hands where we can see 'em.

Remember in every decision you make that there are now no more free Wacos and the Law of Unintended Consequences still trumps every best-laid plan.

But if you can get your traditionally agenda-driven cowboy agency actually under control and operating according to law, it will go a good way to minimizing the chance of an accidental discharge leading to the next American civil war.

With hope, but not much faith, I look forward to the remainder of your tenure as ATF Director.

Good luck.

You're going to need it.

In fact, we all are.

Mike Vanderboegh
The alleged leader of a merry band of Three Percenters.

PS And quit whining.  It is unbecoming of a former Marine.