All aboard Amtrak -- in Germany, circa 1938. (Still from "The Mortal Storm.") |
“Is
anyone present carrying more than ten marks, or planning to take out of the
country any foreign money, gold, jewels, or other valuables?” demanded the
German customs inspector after boarding the Innsbruck-bound train. “Any
violation of the law will be punished with penal servitude --special cases by
death.”
Freya
Roth, a single woman in her 20s traveling with her mother and younger brother,
produced her passport and handed it to the inspector. After the document was
stamped, the truculent bureaucrat noticed the young lady’s luggage.
“Whose
suitcase is that?” he snapped, his voice colored with an implied threat. “Take
it down – open it.”
“It
isn’t locked,” Freya said quietly, her brows drawn together in worried
puzzlement. Before she had finished the sentence the inspector had torn open
the luggage and started to paw through it. A comrade noticed a large bound
volume on the shelf above Freya’s seat. He retrieved it and began to pore over
its handwritten pages.
“What
is that – code?” the policeman inquired of Freya.
“No
– it’s a physiological treatise,” she replied, proudly explaining that it had
been written by her late father, Professor Victor Roth.
Radiating
hostile disapproval, the inspector handed the manuscript to a Gestapo officer
who had been looming in the background, a silent monolith of murderous menace.
“Why
are you taking this out of the country?” the officer barked at Freya. “You
intend on publishing it abroad?”
Freya
tried to explain that she kept the book with her because it was her father’s
last work, which was enough to implicate her as an enemy of the State.
“I can’t take the responsibility of allowing you to cross the border with this document,” sniffed the officer as if he owned Freya and everything in her possession. “This is a matter that can only be decided by my superior.”
“I can’t take the responsibility of allowing you to cross the border with this document,” sniffed the officer as if he owned Freya and everything in her possession. “This is a matter that can only be decided by my superior.”
Freya
was taken to a local police station where she was detained for five days for
possession of contraband – “a seditious production sustaining a theory
destructive to the new ideals.”
“You belong – in part – to the German race,
but by your action you show yourself unworthy to represent that race abroad,”
the police commander explained to Freya, alluding to her paternal Jewish
ancestry. “You will report to the police daily. Let me warn you to be extremely
careful in your conduct, and in your contacts. That is all.”
The
traumatized woman was “released” to life as an inmate in an open-air prison.
She had been condemned and dispossessed without a trial as the result of a
warrantless search of her effects during a routine train trip.
Freya’s
Nazi-era experience, depicted in the 1940 film The Mortal Storm, was a fictional
parable intended to shock its American audience: Imagine what it would be like
to live in a country where police could board a train, rifle through your
luggage, confiscate anything of value they found, and detain you indefinitely
if they found suspected contraband in your possession.
I
don’t know if Aaron Heuser, a mathematician from Eugene, Oregon, is familiar
with “The Mortal Storm.” He doesn’t need to see the movie – he has lived it.
As Heuser recounted to
Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic
magazine,
during an Amtrak trip from Eugene to Washington, D.C. last fall, he received an
unwelcome visit in his sleeper compartment by a DEA agent whose comportment was
indistinguishable from that of the cinematic Nazi officials who terrorized
Freya Roth.
The
DEA agent addressed Heuser by name and claimed that his trip had raised numerous
“red flags” – specifically, that “I had a sleeper car, was traveling alone, and
did not check my luggage.”
When
the officious pest demanded access to the sleeper compartment and Heuser’s
personal effects, the traveler refused. Undeterred, the agent informed Heuser
“that he was going to bring a dog, walk it by my room, and that if it alerted,
my room would be searched. He told me that I could not argue this and that I
was not allowed to be present for the search.”
Like
nearly everything else that emerges from the tax-devouring skull cave of a DEA
official, that claim was a lie. Heuser had every right to be present during the
search, but the agent insisted that he absent himself because “the dog might
bite me.” In retrospect, and perhaps at the time, that statement could be seen
as a threat garbed in the unpersuasive disguise of solicitude.
As
Heuser strode toward the dining car, he was stalked by a second DEA operative
who tried to get him to leave the train, where he would be surrounded by other
law enforcement officers.
“The
officer followed me, telling me that they know I am transporting drugs, and if
I have any for personal use, they do not care, and it would be easier if I just
told them,” Heuser told The Atlantic. “I said that was nice to know, then kept
walking.” Yet another DEA operative tried to gain access by pretending that
“someone was hiding in my bathroom.”
When
Heuser was finally allowed to return to his compartment, “I found my backpack
moved and open, and my wallet, which was set down on the room table, had $60
missing.” He was told by a dining car attendant that “Amtrak is forced to give
passenger info to the Feds, that the DEA comes on every trip, usually arresting
someone in the sleeping car or taking all their money.”
That
Amtrak employee did not engage in hyperbole, as Joseph Rivers can testify. The 22-year-old native
of Romulus, Michigan, was robbed by DEA agents when his Los Angeles-bound train
was stopped and searched in Albuquerque. Rivers, who entertained ambitions of becoming
a music video producer, was carrying his life savings -- $16,000 in cash – in a
bank envelope.
Behaving
precisely like his fictional Nazi analogues from “The Mortal Storm,” the DEA
agent confiscated every penny of Rivers’ life savings without arresting him or
charging him with a crime. Under the Justice Department’s civil asset forfeiture
program, possession of large sums of cash or other exceptional wealth – “gold,
jewels, or other valuables,” as the customs inspector put it in the film – is
sufficiently suspicious to justify confiscation.
“We
don’t have to prove that the person is guilty,” gloated a DEA agent when asked
about the incident by the Albuquerque Journal. “It’s that the money is presumed
to be guilty.” Sean Waite, the DEA’s Ortsgruppenleiter for Albuquerque, bragged to the Albuquerque Free Press that his he and his
squalid associates have harvested about $1 million from travelers passing
through that city on Amtrak’s Southwest Chief.
Setting
aside questions about the wisdom of carrying his entire life savings in cash,
Joseph Rivers’ experience is especially poignant, given that he could just as
easily have been robbed by his local police.
Between 2003 and 2007 – the years of Rivers’ adolescence – Romulus witnessed a 118 percent increase in forfeiture revenues despite the fact that there was no corresponding increase in criminal activity. A similar trend was seen on the part of law enforcement agencies throughout Wayne and Oakland counties. The forfeiture take by police in Novi went from $12,278 to $2.7 million. The Wayne County Sheriff's Office netted $8.69 million in 2007, four times the haul its banditti seized in 2001.
Sgt. Dave Schreiner, the head of Canton Township's forfeiture unit, was admirably forthright in defending civil forfeiture as his department’s chief cash conduit: "Police departments right now are looking for ways to generate revenue, and forfeiture is a way to offset the costs of doing business.... You'll find that departments are doing more forfeitures than they used to because they've got to -- they're running out of money and they've got to find it somewhere."
Bear
in mind, once again, that this defense of forfeiture was offered at a time when
the non-official crime rate was holding steady, and by some measurements in a
modest decline. Acting with the irrepressible predatory instinct that guides
all State institutions, the police responded to this state of affairs by
carrying out a crime wave of their own.
For
the privileged plunderers of Romulus and the surrounding towns, preying on the
public was encouraged and rewarded – but holding back any of the loot from your
cohorts was a grave offense. This is why former Romulus
Police Chief Michael St. Andre, his wife, and several members of his Special
Investigations Unit will spend time in prison.
Between
2006 and 2011, St. Andre and his
underlings skimmed money from the city’s forfeiture fund and submitted
fraudulent expense reports. Some of the pilfered proceeds were used by St.
Andre and his wife to open a tanning salon. The Chief and his favored henchmen also
used funds seized in
counter-narcotics raids to purchase marijuana, alcohol, and the carnal services
of prostitutes.
A
year ago, St. Andre pleaded guilty to three felonies, including embezzlement
and conducting a criminal enterprise. Last October he was
sentenced to a term of up to 20 years in prison, a punishment
forcefully underscoring the State’s determination that its plunderers act with
only the purest of motives – like the ascetic, disciplined Nazi inspectors
portrayed in “The Mortal Storm,” for example.
The
Nazis’ reputation for self-denial was largely unearned. Their version of
totalitarianism is as dead as their Fuhrer, but their tactics are widely
employed by the enforcement caste in America’s Homeland Security State – a fact
that either is or soon will be apparent to anybody seeking to exercise the
right to travel unmolested.
Recall the question asked by the Nazi customs inspector in “The Mortal Storm”: “Is anyone present carrying more than ten marks, or … any foreign money, gold, jewels, or other valuables?” That same question was posed – almost verbatim – by Idaho State Trooper Justin Klitch following a pretext stop of Colorado resident Darien Roseen a few miles from my home in January 2013.
“How
much cash is in the vehicle?” asked Klitch after bullying the elderly man into
opening the trunk of his vehicle and pretending to detect a “strong odor of
marijuana” emanating from the interior. “Do you have any gold, any high-value
items in this vehicle?” That question provided a good and sufficient
demonstration of Klitch’s true motive in making the stop: He was looking for
loot, rather than contraband.
Like
the fictional Freya Roth, Roseen endured a lengthy and entirely unwarranted
detention after Klitch hijacked his SUV. A thorough search of the vehicle
yielded neither gold, nor jewels, nor marijuana.
A
growing number of Americans who need to travel but want to avoid molestation or
irradiation at airports have taken to the roads or the tracks, only to find
that the TSA and its comrades will not leave them alone.
In the film, Freya and her family were interrogated and subject to detention by Nazi customs officials at a border crossing. Americans can have that experience – which can quickly escalate to threats of arrest and a life-threatening assault with a deadly weapon – up to 100 miles inside the national border.
In the film, Freya and her family were interrogated and subject to detention by Nazi customs officials at a border crossing. Americans can have that experience – which can quickly escalate to threats of arrest and a life-threatening assault with a deadly weapon – up to 100 miles inside the national border.
Travelers aren't free from such potentially lethal harassment if they use routes deep within the country’s interior. Multi-jurisdictional task forces called Visual Intermodal Prevention and Response (VIPR) teams swarm bus and train stations, and even conduct highway checkpoints.
As
the redoubtable James Bovard points out, the attitude of our
rulers toward travelers “is best summarized by the motto posted at the
headquarters of the TSA air marshal training center: `Dominate. Intimidate.
Control.’”
Whatever
their native tongue, totalitarians from every culture speak the same language.
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Dum spiro, pugno!
13 comments:
Its only started, wait until things start taking some real traction. You an't seen nothing yet!
Sorry, I'm not always as literate as you, Mr. Griggs.
Fuck the police and all the sycophant copsucking sheeple that blindly support them.
The most sickening thing about this are the people that defend the police. I get called a radical and an extremist, because I call it highway robbery. Yet, no one, not one single person, can tell me how it's not highway robbery. Armed men stop you from travelling down the road, and under threat of harm paw through your conveyance; taking whatever they please. Sometimes they let you go, sometimes they kill you, sometimes they hold you for a ransom (only they call it bail when it's the state doing it). I'm failing to see how it isn't highway robbery.
Baaaaaaa baaaaaaaa if we give them what they want and demand they will move on and leave us alone. Baaaaa, baaaaa.
We lost half a million in horses to civil forfeiture and had our reputations ruined. I spent a year in jail for violation of probation which I was never on. We are being forced to sell our ranch and move out of the county or go to jail again and are now being told to plead guilty to a least one charge so they can save face because they realize they made a big mistake with the forfeitures. I also had to plead guilty to two other charges I didn't have and they said they would try and find something to charge me with since I didn't have anything. That's just a very short version of some of the unbelievable harassment we have gone through in the last 10 years in the government's land grab scheme.
Smokin45, this is my exact point. This is robbery, plain and simple. On top of robbery, they are attempting to coerce you into going to jail.
I'm not necessarily opposed to the idea of asset forfeiture. If you make a million bucks for committing murder, you should NOT be allowed to keep that million bucks (you will note, I do not include selling drugs to be something worth losing your money and going to jail for). I AM, however, opposed to using forfeiture to fund police departments, and being allowed to seize money without a conviction.
With all the gifts of MRAPs and other military hardware, how else will the police departments fund their maintenance?
The bottom line is, simple to understand when expresses honestly. Back in the days of nazi power, the cops and military and the rest who where paid by a government entity. Justified the abuse of the citizens as, "it's my job, that's what I'm ordered to do". The lazy scum did not to do work in the private sector that may lead to them getting dirt under their fingernails. The rest is history, a history of evil straight from Satin himself to destroy millions and millions of people in the most horrific evil and rabid forms of death the sickest minds could devise. The very blueprint of this stain of evilness in human history is being repeated by government paid people, as this story makes soundly clear. The very same words by such government employees are spot on the same, "it's my job, that I'm ordered to do". People better wake up fast because it's now spinning out of control. E.G., the police just murdered 9 men in Waco TX and jailed 170 wittnesses with bail so high none will be able to tell the truth of what happen. JADE HELM 15, is night time training to snatch Americans out of their homes at night by military and police. This is the largest military operation in the history of the United States, on our soil. It will last for no less that 2 months. It's happening right now in America and America is going to become a Satonic hell hole that will be a huge stain in human history.
Look at the bright side, folks. With every theft committed, the thugs have created another implacable enemy. That almost looks like their real job - creating enemies that will enjoy putting them up against the wall some day. What's the old saying, "A conservative is a liberal who has been mugged?" An anarchist is a statist who has been mugged by the state.
"...secure in the persons and papers..." ??
The money they seize from their victims doesn't begin to fund the whole enterprise. It only funds its additional expansion.
We should not be surprised at the grotesque waste, mission creep and abuses of power given how much the federal and several state governments have totally wasted trying to get ObamaCare(tm) web sites running.
One of the roots a wasteful, foolish, intrusive, thuggish, and sometimes tyrannous government is the ease with which it can create almost unlimited amounts of money out of thin air. Near-infinite money buys near-infinite government, and a bureaucracy that is generously funded can entertain an open-ended dream about how to expand its realm.
Every day more people are coming to the judgment that a carefully organized effort to repair the constitution via the States' power to propose and ratify amendments poses less risk to our liberty and prosperity than the present trajectory of the federal government and especially the federal bureaucracy whose self-published rules carry the weight of law.
The first order of business of an Article V Convention must be to limit government's ability to create and spend near-infinite amounts of money.
-- theBuckWheat must remain anonymous.
Government never reduces itself. All evil doings of governments start at a point of seemingly innocent and grow into governments like the nazi government. All of this police state stuff is going to keep growing until it becomes exactly like the nazi governmet The key is limited government and that is what needs to start happening, if there is still time left which is unlikely. An examplie of what would happen would be like cutting peple off of Food Stamps and Welfare. There would be serious violence. This is the same if government is reduced, there would be riots and destruction. No matter how you slice it, this country has very serious problems to solve to make America the free country that it was intended to be.
Any Law Enforcement Officer involved in such conduct should be hunted down like a game animal. If they try this on me, or anyone in my family, I swear to God above that I will hunt down and wreak vengeance on every costumed thug who was present.
When I travel. itsnever with less than 16,000 in cash. Who knows what opportunities may present themselves? And I always wanted to be in recreational pharmaceuticals.
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