About 15 years ago I read a very small piece in the Washington Post that went like this:
An early morning raid on a crack house in DC...DEA agents...three people killed, one wounded...no drugs were found on the premises.
After reading this I couldn't get it out of my mind. Here are some people sleeping in the early morning hours when federal agents break in and start shooting. "So what! It was a crack house and they were just a bunch of dirty drug-dealers." Well, oops, no drugs were found. "Sorry for shooting your husband ma'am--we got the wrong address." And what if drugs had been found? Does that justify murder by federal agents? Do we not still have the right to due process? Innocent until proven guilty?
I wondered if this was just the beginning of something bigger. Looking back in history, the "war on drugs" wasn't actually the beginning, since the prohibition of alcohol in the 1930's led to some of this style of policing. But the idea of a growing federal police state is, in fact, on the right track.
With the election of Obama I tried to close my ears to stories that the federal government was now the biggest purchaser of guns, and not just for the DEA and DHS but for the
Dept. of Agriculture and NOAA, about attempts by the ATF to decrease availability of ammunition to the public, stories of increasing federal power --
I just didn't want to know because it's scary. But check this recent
USAToday article:
In the wake of the Baltimore riots,
Al Sharpton is
calling for the federal takeover of local police. Like most ideas from the loathsome Rev. Sharpton, this is a lousy one. But since
federalizing local police is actually an
Obama administration idea, it's worth paying a bit more attention.
The idea behind federal supervision of local police forces is that it will make them more accountable. Instead of a bunch of presumptively racist, violent hicks running things on a local level, we'll see the cool professionalism of the national government in charge.
There are (at least) two problems with this approach. The first is that federal law enforcement, especially in recent years, hasn't exactly been a haven of cool professionalism. The second is that no law enforcement agency is very good at policing itself, meaning that a national police force is likely to be less accountable, not more. And there's a third problem, too, but we'll get to that in a minute.
If you fail to learn from history you are doomed to repeat it. The Founding Fathers had just come from an oppressive political environment, and were determined to not let that happen again. That is why the Constitution grants only very limited powers to the federal government: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." Article X.
Why is it superior to have the states in charge of miscellaneous governmental duties? Because if the state that you're living in becomes corrupt, oppressive, incompetent at protecting your liberties or even maliciously taking them away, you can move to a different one! Then that state will fail and must reform because all the responsible people are leaving behind the group who likes to live "la vida loca"-- the producers are leaving behind all the consumers (think California). But if the federal government grows corrupt and oppressive...yes, you can move to another country, but it's much harder.
Early morning raids and shows of overwhelming force are the province of the Nazis and other totalitarian regimes. One fabulous way to exert control over the populace is to create specious and oppressive laws and then persecute those who break them. And that's just what happened in 2009.
Blanding, Utah: Anasazi Junk Heap
To have any kind of perspective into the following story one needs to know some brief history. From around 700 to 1300 A.D. the Ancestral Puebloan people inhabited the area known as "Four Corners" where UT, AZ, NM, and CO meet. Beginning around 1150 a three hundred year drought (climate change! outlaw those SUVs!) caused the population to decrease and likely to move to areas where there were more dependable sources of water, and the area around Blanding, in the southeast corner of Utah, was mostly uninhabited except for a few Navajo hunting parties. The Mormons, obedient to the request of their prophet/leaders, colonized the area in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The area is still out of the way, the populations is small. It remains today what it has always been, a high desert, difficult to access, full of red rock formations, and to my eyes, completely beautiful.
And full of pots. Southeast Utah is a bit like Egypt: very dry, nothing decays, nothing grows over and hides everything below it. It just stays the same. So you can very well imagine that centuries of Anasazi junk is laying everywhere--hundreds of thousands or probably millions pieces have been collected: pots, pieces of pots, weapons, turkey-feather blankets, baskets, moccasins, beads, bone tools, cliff paintings, and more pots! And there's still more--occasional rainstorms wash away sediment and more stuff emerges all the time. Mormon farmers had to clear pottery out of their fields when they began plowing. Builders of houses and diggers of wells would find themselves disturbing ancient graves. In contrast, the area in which I live (Virginia) was home to millions of pre-Columbian inhabitants over the centuries, but there are very few traces left--it's just too damp here, and things decay in decades not centuries. I mention this because some people have got it in their minds that people shouldn't disturb the remains of previous civilizations. But that's silly if you put it into the lens of history, in which most human civilizations were built literally on top of the previous one: look at modern Rome, built on medieval Rome, built on ancient Rome.
Collector Bandits
Since 1906 there have been laws preventing the removal of archaeological artifacts from public lands. But they have been selectively enforced, since it's a bit ridiculous to go collect an infinite number of pottery pieces and warehouse them away...especially when there's already warehouses full of them. In fact, BLM agents were once caught red-handed smashing pots, because the museums had all they wanted and there wasn't anywhere to store them.
When my father was on his LDS mission to Australia in the 50's, a federal agent of some sort came around visiting all the homes in Blanding and confiscated all the artifacts that his family had collected: a beautiful turkey feather blanket, moccasins, some nice pots, etc. My grandma turned them over to him without a fuss, and without checking for proof that he was actually who he said he was or that he had legal authority to the items. When my father got home from his mission he spent some time trying to track down what happened to the things he had collected. He was never able to find them in any museum, and wonders if the "agent" was a swindler, or if he was really a federal agent, but sold them to other collectors on the sly to pad his pockets.
The artifact collection tradition continued however. Just as I wouldn't hesitate to pick up a pretty rock while out on a hike, residents of the Four Corners area wouldn't hesitate to pick up a nice pottery shard--unless they already had a dozen just like it. In neither case would the thought, "This (rock/shard) might be the key to finally unlocking the (geological/anthropological) history of this place!" cross the mind.
American Gestapo
I have heard from several sources that after Obama was elected, he directed the federal agencies to become more aggressive in their enforcing methods. This has been seen in increasing penalties and in prosecutions for more minor infractions by many federal agencies. It also came into play in antiquities. Operation Cerberus Action had been a brain-child of the BLM and FBI since 2007, and involved the bribing of an antiquities dealer to turn traitor and bring them dozens of names of collectors in southeast Utah. If the investigation had concluded before the end of 2008, it may have been different. But it carried into the next administration, after the "aggressive" policy was implemented.
The sad story that ensued is told in detail in this
LA Times article "A Sting in the Desert" - which should be a Pulitzer prize winner -- complete with videos from the button camera worn by Ted Gardiner, the dealer/traitor, as he went into the homes of the residents. The "sting" was a raid on the town of Blanding; about 80 FBI and BLM agents showed up in dozens of black SUVs, wearing body armor and carrying semi-automatic weapons. They shoved their way into homes in the early morning hours of June 10, 2009, shouting and demanding native artifacts. They manhandled the 24 defendants, chained many of them hand, foot, and around their middle, attaching them together like convicts in a chain gang. My father told me that many of them were NOT ALLOWED TO GET DRESSED - if they were wearing their underwear when the agents burst into their homes, that's what they wore when hauled to the next town for interrogation. The Gestapo tactics used on Dr. James Redd, the town's only physician, so disturbed him that he committed suicide the next day. Two more suicides were to follow - one, a defendant in another town, and the other, Ted Gardiner.
Operation Cerberus Action was a tragedy on many levels. The local sheriff said that there was no reason for federal agent involvement. He could have knocked on their doors in broad daylight with a summons for them to appear in court, and they would have been there. The agents already had video evidence that the artifacts were in their possession, so all that was needed was to determine how those things came into their possession, and what the penalties would be. These were life-long residents of Blanding, most members of a religion that decries dishonesty and law-breaking (but doesn't have much to say about old pots sitting on the shelf in your china cabinet). They weren't going to run for Mexico.
There is also reason to believe that the agents intentionally overestimated the value of the items so that the defendants would be charged with felonies instead of misdemeanors. In the case of Dr. Redd, the tiny shell bead he had picked up--value $40 to $200 on the market--was inflated to $1000 in order to qualify as a felony. A physician who is convicted of a felony will lose his medical license. They knew that. So did he.
But I believe the biggest tragedy is the change in the relationship of the people to their government. The residents of Blanding were traumatized that day. Shouting, threatening, intimidating, manhandling, dehumanizing behavior was heaped upon them by their fellow American citizens, employees of the Bureau of Land Management and Federal Bureau of Investigations. They don't trust the feds any more.
And where are those 80 agents now? What did that day do to their souls, to their attitude about proper conduct during law enforcement? Who are the people who trained them to act like that toward unarmed citizens, and how many others have they trained in these same tactics in the mean time? Is this what "innocent until proven guilty" looks like now? I'm not OK with that.
And in the end, it backfired on them. The roughness with which they were treated, along with the suicides, came up in court and the defendants were given very light penalties (which a lot of people concerned with archaeology were miffed about). The penalty implemented at the time of arrest was the true penalty, but it's difficult to quantify that type of abuse so I'm sure it didn't make a big splash in the world of black market antiquities dealers.
Too bad all around--lots of pain, no real gain for anyone.
