I Couldn't Sleep At All Last Night—& Yes, I DO Know Why

At the beginning of the novel Jonatha’s Truth, a young woman’s family is assaulted and annihilated by a federal SWAT team acting upon FBI records falsified by an IRS official bent upon retaliating against a taxpayer who has thwarted collection efforts. When Jonatha serendipitously escapes, she is pursued relentlessly and with implacable single-mindedness by FBI officials, who, even when they have discovered the truth, remain intent upon covering up what has happened and all it portends.

Fantastic? Just a novel? No, it happens again and again in the Land of the Free. Since 1995, as a matter of fact, “there have been at least 292 botched SWAT raids–where, for example, an innocent person or nonviolent offender was killed or there was a ‘wrong address’ raid.” That’s from a Cato Institute research paper, and there are many more like it on the internet.

http://www.cato.org/raidmap/index.php
http://www.law.uga.edu/academics/profiles/dwilkes_more/52swatstika.html
http://www.justiceforsal.com/2006/03/no-justice-for-sal-today.html

“Since 1995,” the paper goes on, “SWAT raids have resulted in the deaths of at least 40 innocent persons and 20 nonviolent offenders, and in the death or injury of 22 police officers.” In one real-life raid like the fictional one in “Jonatha’s Truth,” thirty-seven years old Dr Salvatore Culosi Jr. had come out of his townhouse to meet an undercover policeman when he was shot through the chest by a Special Weapons and Tactics force. A particularly innocuous type, the doctor was unarmed and doing nothing remotely suggesting threatening or violent intentions. The last of the URLs here has the story.

Police say shooting was an accident. They don’t say Dr. Culosi isn’t dead (that happens, incidentally – when the victim is the victim of government, he just vanishes and the case remains “open”).

In the autobiographical book “Letters to Aaron, the Hal Luebbert Story,” I relate having lived for seventeen years in fear of what happened to Doctor Culosi. For nearly ten of those years, I lived mostly in the wilderness, in order to be free of the threat posed by the possibility, even probability, of what happened in my novel and to the doctor

A licensed pilot, former parachutist, mountaineer and rock climber, scuba diver, and life-long competitor, I’m not normally a fearful man. Most people who know me would tell you that. But during what seemed eternity, I lived in continual, almost constant fear of what happened to Dr. Culosi. I was, among many other similar things, stopped more than one hundred nine (that’s the number in the diary I started keeping after several stops had already occurred) times on the nation’s streets and highways.

Each time involved a confrontation with an armed man provoked by falsified records, and literally dozens of times the man either pointed a pistol at me or had it in his hand.

Lately, I’ve “come down from the woods” to live in a proper house, but it is three A.M. and I can’t sleep. Licensed to carry a concealed weapon (it was a hell of a fight to get the license, but the truth prevails – sometimes), it’s a few inches from my hand right now, and it accompanies me everywhere I go. Unless it is near my hand, I can’t sleep.

Tonight, the fear was exceptional, brought on, I think, by recent events in the news; recent events, that is, which include the vicious ravings of people like whatever-the-hell-she-is Ann Coulter, television “host” Sean Hannity, and their megalomaniacal ilk.

I should probably point out here that the other extreme of political minimalism, the “liberal” (how the hell did these lunatics come by names like “conservative” and “liberal?”) seems somehow less dangerous – inasmuch as the threat posed by a nut case nitwit who won’t fight for anything is a secondary one, one only dangerous in that it inexorably results in a kind of impunity for the “conservative” nut case nitwit who wants to shoot first and ask questions later.

Most of the time – like many people, I suspect - I just feel trapped.

Added to the effect of it all is the threat posed by that weird – with Mr. George W. Bush, words seem to fail me of late – man in the White House. Having discovered many years ago (May, 1985) that the federal government spies ruthlessly on just about anyone, contriving any excuse necessary, I am aware that even when I sleep, I am being somehow “surveilled” – watched. I don’t suppose even George Orwell knows what that really means, what it does to its object.

Remember Orwell? “1984?” “It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate, they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”

Now, I understand that people reading this might discount it all as paranoia. Regaled continually - almost daily, these days - with the psycho-babble so dear to the hearts of the effeminate nation we’ve become, everyone is an amateur psychologist. The thing is, the government not only got caught doing illegal surveillance, wire-tapping, they admitted having done it. Now, more’s the pity, the president of the United States not only says publicly that he’s doing it, he asserts that he has the right to do it. “Terrorism,” you know. It’s real, all right.

In fact, it wasn’t until September 11, 2001 that the open, right in your face, what- the-hell-are-you-gonna-do-about-it surveillance ceased. Too busy, what with the new “threat” and the need to “Hollywood up” those weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, I suppose.

But they’re there. I can feel them. Once you’ve been hunted, you see, you get a sixth sense for the eyes of an enemy. Oh, I’m paranoid, all right. I hate telephone calls, can’t use the phone without the most extreme nervous discomfort. My friends are annoyed when I end calls abruptly or just hang up, but I can’t help it. Still, my sixth sense has never failed, not once. Each time I wake up like this, each time I suddenly and for no ostensible reason get that feeling I always had when standing “on deck” before a judo match, the government “pulls something.” During seventeen years, it never failed. I was waiting for them when it happened, or when they came.

Now, though, it’s Mr. Bush and that eminence grís of his, Cheney (Jesus! – that’s an evil-looking man!) that give me my strange premonition. Think of it this way: In the real world, as it is in the book “Jonatha’s Truth,” there is nowhere to hide. Imagine that they come for you one night, smash down the doors and pour into your house with pointed weapons. You haven’t done anything, but startled from your sleep – terrified, maybe – you shoot one.

Or, maybe, you shoot all of them. I practice that on a routine basis, you know. The doors and windows here are rigged to hinder the typical assault (I wrote the original paper describing and designing the S.W.A.T team ten years before the first such team was organized), and I practice daily with the weapon I keep within reach every minute. And there’s more; but as Mr. Bush is wont to say, “we don’t want to give the enemy anything.”

Anyway, you kill them all. NOW what do you do? Do you think the government – people of the caliber of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney (how about Ann Coulter or Sean Hannity) will admit they were in the wrong house? Do you think a court will defend you? Your “rights,” all that? You do need to read “Letters” or “Jonatha.”

More, you need to re-read the history of the last couple of decades. Make a couple of trips to a law library. Consider the men now proved innocent by DNA testing but being held by stubborn authorities. “Actual innocence,” a court in Illinois said not long ago, “isn’t necessarily grounds to release someone from prison.” http://www.aslme.org/media/transcriptions/dna_wrk4/swedlow.pdf

A number of courts have agreed, recently. "In the last ten years,” one reporter said, “DNA testing has uncovered stone-cold proof that sixty-five completely innocent people have been sent to prison and death row. But even in cases where there is physical evidence, the criminal justice system frees prisoners only after a torturous legal process. Incredibly, according to many trial judges, "actual innocence" is not grounds for release from prison."

So, to return to our supposing, there you are. An enemy of the state. That kind of state. Yeah, I suppose you could say this is one time that ignorance is bliss – it’s better that you don’t know what is happening to your country, your countrymen, and neighbors. Maybe if I pretend the tiger marauding in the neighborhood isn’t there, he’ll eat me last.

But you do know, now. Those are dead cops on the floor, and there are more outside. You could be the Blessed Virgin and he was raping you, they don’t care. You killed a cop. It wouldn’t make any difference if you hadn’t, if one of them had accidentally killed one of them or the rest. Who do you think will get the blame – now, in a country like this?

Yeah, I know – I’m paranoid. Well, tell me this? Haven’t I also been describing Iraq? In “Jonatha’s Truth,” the reason for the SWAT raid was a record that said Jonatha’s father was a suspected drug trafficker. And, of course, he was dangerous. He liked to shoot. Played judo. There were probably weapons in the house. The reason the SWAT team surrounded Dr. Salvatore Culosi’s house and ordered him from it to face the guns that killed him was that he made sports bets (gambling is sometimes a crime). Obviously – they sent a SWAT team – he had weapons – “of mass destruction, maybe.”

What got us into Iraq? Why can’t we get out? Kisten to Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, and the rest. I don’t want to give away the denouement of my novel, but Jonatha and Baron von Paulus, the man who came to her aid, faced the same problem. Ars celare artem, folks. You think that a government who will raid a man’s house, kill and then cover it up wouldn’t do the same to a nation and its people? You think they didn’t? If it were you or me, it would be called “modus operandi.” You think that a government that won’t let an innocent man out of jail, even when science has proved that he could not be guilty, will stop the war in Iraq? You think they won’t invade Iran?

Now do you see why I can’t sleep?