April 15 - "America" On Its Knees.

April 15, 2006:

One of the wounds inflicted by the United States, "Land of the Free," "Nation of Laws," on October 6, 1986.

April 15, the day citizens of the Land of the Free cringe in terror - for some, mortal - before the government put there to protect their civil rights and to guarantee their dignity as human beings. April 15, "America" On Its Knees Day. April 15, the day the Home of the Brave reveals the truth, to become the cringing, groveling cowards they really are. I stay away from the public that day, nauseous and disgusted, fearful I'll puke at the sight of a flag being flown from some putty person's car, or being waved from a porch. Jesus! -you make me sick!

Actually, the more red-letter day for me is May 6. That's the anniversary of the morning in 1985, when I caught the government of the United States with its facade of pompous purity down. As the men carried garbage bags full of my property across the patio of my burglarized home, I put the sights of my 1911 .45 on first one head, then another. Had I pulled the trigger, things would have been different today. I couldn't do that, a matter of honor. My enemies die in front of me, with at least a chance to survive. That, of course, is not the way of the United States of America. They operate in the night; or - as we've seen lately - from very long distance or altitude, safe even from the women and children who are their intended victims. As I say, I stay out of populated places a great deal now - fearful that I might still come upon one of the people who destroyed my life just because they happened then to have the power necessary. Should that happen, I would tear him apart with the hands I have been training for that purpose all these years. Insane with disgust and rage, I would scatter him about, laughing at the satisfaction.

Yes, I stay home.

I stay home because a nation of self-righteous cowards, the kind of things that send the federal mad dog they have created to torment and murder others, would be offended. Such behavior in one of their number would be reprehensible, whatever they have done to him.

Actually, it all started on September 11, 1967. That's a fearsome co-incidence, of course, but on the day you're thinking about, I could only nod my head knowingly. What you sew, you reap. Chickens do come home to roost. In my case, disaster came in the form of a letter - poet Langston Hughes' little, old letter. How does it go? "Just a pencil and paper, You don’t need no gun or knife—A little old letter, Can take a person’s life."

This letter said I owed the United States $127.17. For some reason, that "seventeen" always means trouble, don't know why. Anyway, the letter said that if I didn't send the money, they would punish me. Had that not been in there, things might have been a lot different today, too. You don't threaten me. No matter who you are, or how many of you there are, YOU DO NOT TRY TO INFLICT FEAR IN ME!

So, I fought back, we went to court (this was a long time ago, when judges were still about truth, justice, and what was called the "American Way"). The money I was supposed to owe was the deduction for car mileage and expense, and in this case, I was only asking for the mileage figure stated in the tax bulletin that came with the federal tax forms. The IRS, their lawyer informed the judge, decided whether to allow things like that, and they weren't allowing mine. No one would drive that many miles on business, the female lawyer said.

Now, it happened that the car had been purchased for just that purpose, business, I had another car for personal use, and a number of witnesses - one who happened to be my attorney that day - and stacks of files that recorded where I had driven, whom I had seen, et cetera. The judge got up, went downstairs to where I had parked the car, looked at the odometer, and came back to rule in my favor.

On the way down the courthouse steps that day, the IRS attorney called to me, "You may think you've won, mister, but you haven't heard the last of this!"

IRS was as good as her word. In the years that followed, even when I filed only for the standard deduction, IRS "audited" my return to make me prove I was legally married, that my children were mine, and that sort of thing. Power lets you do things like that. Finally, having received the "Notice of Intent to Audit," I wrote across the paper, "Fuck you" and mailed it back. On September 11, the next year, the axe fell.

The story is in my book, "Letters to Aaron, the Hal Luebbert Story." It will suffice to say here that the United States and its cravenly coward and complicit public destroyed my business, broke up my marriage and family, and took effective steps to assure that I would never be gainfully employed again. Nevertheless, tough and stubborn son of a bitch that I am, I recovered, built another business, remarried, and started over. In 1985, the IRS did it all over again. That they were able to succeed has less to do with their admittedly awesome power than it had to do with what society does to us all during our lives.

I refer to the myths, myths like that of what our government is and what we are, myths about "rights" and the "dignity of man." Tell that to a black man, like Langston Hughes. Tell it to a native American like Hin-Mo-Too-Yah-Lat-Kekht (Chief Joseph). Tell it to a historian like Professor Ward Churchill. But I believed the myths, such that I kept making mistakes, critical ones. The worst was to believe that government must obey the law it enacts. As the IRS and its federal henchmen broke law after law, and violated the U.S. Constitution again and again, so powerful in me was the indoctrination we all receive as children and citizens of the Nation of Laws, Home of the Free that I learned far too slowly how it is that you must operate in fighting the tyrants and tyranny of government.

When I had finally come up to speed, when twenty-three attorneys to whom I went for legal help all had told me what one of their number stated so well - "IRS takes what it wants and pisses on the rest," I counter-attacked. There is one thing certain about all warfare, all fighting. You must find your enemy's weakness. "Suki o mitsukeru," we say in Japanese - "Find the opening." Most people who work for government are corrupt and dishonest, as Thomas Jefferson once observed. "A certain rottenness begins . . . in their character." That's where I looked, and I found what for me was a gold mine.

When I had infiltrated and installed listening and eavesdropping equipment in government offices and installations across the country, I found rampant crime. Embezzlement, wrongful misappropriation of property, and outright theft. That people still express surprise, or try to argue that I lie, should come as a surprise to anyone aware of the literally billions of dollars the government admits having stolen (witness FEMA in the aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita), but there are still those who want to make ME the liar. I suppose the alternative is to have to admit responsibility for the government they aid and abet daily. Not that crimes against property were the only ones whose evidence I forwarded to U.S. Senators, Congressmen, electronic and print media, and the rest of those so ardently concerned with justice and law. When the woman I call "Sherry" in my book came to me for help in being free of the IRS official using his power to force his sexual attentions (didn't I put that nicely?) upon her, not one of the people who would otherwise have been expected to do his official duty did so. Finally, as I related in my book, "Sherry" was obliged to leave the U.S. for sanctuary elsewhere.

Neither was she alone. After having begun the service I called "Knight Errant," I helped several women - all, by the way, illegal immigrants whose status was being used against them - to escape federal rapists. Johanna Guevara, the heroine of my novel, "Jonatha's Truth," is the fictionalized version of one of these women, and as Perry Lotts, a likewise fictionalized FBI Hostage Rescue Team Commander says, "Christ, anybody would have to be deaf, dumb, blind, and stupid as a brick to believe that guys given that kind of power don’t use it to scratch their horny itch. Especially when they know they can give the broad the choice between putting out a little pussy or going back to some shit-hole like Iran, Iraq, Mexico, or some other banana republic. Jesus Christ. It’s a no-brainer. When you think about it, who in the public really gives a shit?"

And, as a grandfather used to say, "Yeah - that's about the size of it."
My "suki o mitsukeru" tactic was successful - to a degree, anyway. In 1987, a U.S. District Court quashed my Freedom of Information Act suit petitioning for an order requiring the IRS, FBI, and Department of Defense to turn over records having to do with me. "To do otherwise," the court said, "would irreparably damage the tax collection system of the United States." During the proceedings, I was attacked by a carload of men, and my car riddled with gunfire. I escaped, and killed at least two of my assailants. Guess what happened to the massive and incontrovertible (tape recordings, for instance) evidence of felony crime by officials of the U.S. government. Nothing. Nothing happened. Do you really think the king will put himself in jail?

Let me remind you of something, something you seem very, very anxious to forget. It's quoted in my book, "Letters to Aaron, the Hal Luebbert Story," and its author is Gerry Spence, the noted attorney. "At Ruby Ridge, federal agents shot in the back and killed a child’s dog, shot in the back and killed the fleeing child as well, and then blew off the head of that child’s mother . . . even after a cover-up was discovered, the federal government refused to prosecute the killers. At Waco, the government . . . roasted twenty-two children like wieners on a spit and cremated more than fifty adults in the same inferno. Yet no federal officers were prosecuted.”

NEITHER DID THE "AMERICAN" PUBLIC DO ANYTHING! As a matter of fact, it clucked sanctimoniously and nodded its collective head in specious outrage when a guy named McVey lost his cool - as I, for instance, might have lost my mind - and committed what you like to call "terrorism" in retaliation. Suddenly, for some reason incomprehensible to the candid world, the children lost in the Murrah Building were more innocent than those lost at Waco. These same creatures, strange and pitiful apologists for "America" whatever it does, will write to me in response to this, telling me that I should "get over it," that I should continue to support, even love, the nation and people who turned my life to hell. Yeah, that would be real good - good for them. And you.

For me, it would represent the Stockholm Syndrome. Had I, my country, been the "9-11" conspirators, had I planned the operation, you would now be struggling to live - just as you once made me do. The toll of death would have been in the millions, and it would still be growing. And, if you think I boast, I remind you that your government doesn't. Had your cruelty cost me my mind, we would have died together.

But I didn't lose my mind, a thing I am still somehow ashamed of. I believe with John Donne that "No man is an island, entire of itself . . ." Unless you come to feel that way, too, someone will do what I could have done.

Think about it.