The Undocumented Mark Steyn

by Mark Steyn

  Indeed. The federal justice system wins 97 percent of its cases without going to trial, a success rate unknown to all but the most neurotic and insecure dictatorships—and even there they usually feel obliged to go through the motions of a show trial. So the DEA ninjas in the full Robocop staged a three a.m. raid on a small Vermont cape—and made it stick on one count of mail fraud.

  When I run for president with my authentic Hawaiian birth certificate downloaded from the Internet, reforming the federal “justice” system will be high on my agenda.

  1Sir Peregrine is a columnist, former editor of The Sunday Telegraph, and the second person to say the F-word on British television (after Kenneth Tynan, but before the Sex Pistols).

  2The customary euphemism of Her Majesty’s constabulary.

  THE BUTT STOPS HERE

  Syndicated column, November 8, 2013

  AT A TIME when over four million people have had their health insurance canceled, it’s good to know that some Americans can still access prompt medical treatment, even if they don’t want it. David Eckert was pulled over by police in Deming, New Mexico, for failing to come to a complete halt at a stop sign in the Walmart parking lot. He was asked to step out of the vehicle, and waited on the sidewalk. Officers decided that they didn’t like the tight clench of his buttocks, a subject on which New Mexico’s constabulary is apparently expert, and determined that it was because he had illegal drugs secreted therein. So they arrested him, and took him to Gila Regional Medical Center in neighboring Hidalgo County, where Mr. Eckert was forced to undergo two abdominal X-rays, two rectal probes, three enemas, and defecate thrice in front of medical staff and representatives of two law-enforcement agencies, before being sedated and subjected to a colonoscopy—all procedures performed against his will and without a valid warrant.

  Despite their best efforts, Mr. Eckert’s bottom proved to be a drug-free zone, and so, after twelve hours of detention, he was released. If you’re wondering where his lawyer was during all this, no attorney was present, as police had not charged Mr. Eckert with anything, so they’re apparently free to frolic and gambol up his rectum to their hearts’ delight. Deming police chief Brandon Gigante says his officers did everything “by the book.” That’s the problem, in New Mexico and beyond: “the book.”

  Getting into the spirit of things, Gila Regional Medical Center subsequently sent Mr. Eckert a bill for six thousand dollars. It appears he had one of what the President calls those “bad apple” health plans that doesn’t cover anal rape. Doubtless, under the new regime, Obamacare navigators will be happy to take a trip up your northwest passage free of charge. That’s what it is, by the way: anal rape. The euphemisms with which the state dignifies the process—“cavity search”—are distinctions that exist only in the mind of the perpetrator, not the fellow on the receiving end. Fleet Street’s Daily Mail reports that this is at least the second anal fishing expedition mounted by local authorities. Timothy Young underwent a similar experience after being fingered by the same police dog, Leo, who may not be very good at sniffing drugs but certainly has an eye for a pert bottom. At the time of Mr. Young’s arrest, Leo’s police license had reportedly expired a year-and-a-half earlier, but why get hung up on technicalities?

  Messrs Eckert and Young may yet win their cases. But one notes that the Supreme Court has dramatically circumscribed Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure when it occurs at America’s border, and post–9/11 the “border” has been redefined to mean anywhere within one hundred miles of the actual frontier. Many European countries are not one hundred miles wide in their entirety. A hundred-mile buffer zone from Belgium’s northern border, for example, would be well south of the southern border and deep into France. But Deming falls within the hundred-mile Fourth Amendment–free zone, and so, I note, between the seacoast and the Quebec border, does the whole of my own state of New Hampshire. It would be prudent perhaps for Granite Staters to affect a loose-buttocked saunter when strolling around the White Mountains.

  Of course, even with millions of canceled health care policies freeing up medical staff, it is unlikely that the authorities could ever give the full Deming PD treatment to the bulk of the populace. Perhaps that’s why Americans do not seem to get terribly exercised by these cases. There are over three hundred million people, and the chances of Leo taking a fancy to one’s own posterior are relatively remote. Yet tyranny is always capricious, and the willingness of police and compliant doctors and nurses to go along with it ought to disturb a supposedly free people, no matter how comparatively rare it may seem.

  Meanwhile, an unarmed woman was gunned down on the streets of Washington for no apparent crime other than driving too near Barackingham Palace and thereby posing a threat to national security. As disturbing as Miriam Carey’s bullet-riddled body and vehicle were, the public indifference to it is even worse. Ms. Carey does not appear to be guilty of any act other than a panic attack when the heavy-handed and heavier-armed palace guard began yelling at her. Much of what was reported in the hours after her death seems dubious: We are told Ms. Carey was “mentally ill,” although she had no medications in her vehicle and those at her home back in Connecticut are sufficiently routine as to put millions of other Americans in the category of legitimate target. We are assured that she suffered from post-partum depression, as if the inability to distinguish between a depressed mom and a suicide bomber testifies to the officers’ professionalism. Under DC police rules, cops are not permitted to fire on a moving vehicle, because of the risk to pedestrians and other drivers. But the Secret Service and the Capitol Police enjoy no such restraints, so the car doors are full of bullet holes. The final moments of the encounter remain a mystery, but police were supposedly able to extract Ms. Carey’s baby from the back of a two-door vehicle before dispatching the defenseless mother to meet her maker.

  Did I mention she was African-American? When a black teen dies in a late-night one-on-one encounter with a fellow citizen on the streets of Sanford, Florida,1 it’s the biggest thing since Selma. But when a defenseless black woman is gunned down by a posse of Robocops in broad daylight on the streets of the capital, the Reverend Jesse Jackson and the Reverend Al Sharpton and all the other bouffed and pampered grievance-mongers are apparently cool with it.

  This isn’t very difficult. When you need large numbers of supposedly highly trained elite officers to kill an unarmed woman with a baby, you’re doing it wrong. In perhaps the most repugnant reaction to Ms. Carey’s death, the United States Congress expressed their “gratitude” to the officers who killed her and gave them a standing ovation. Back in the Eighties, the Queen woke up to find a confused young man at the end of her bed. She talked to him calmly until help arrived and he was led away. A few years later, Her Majesty’s Canadian Prime Minister, Jean Chrétien, was confronted by an aggrieved protester. As is his wont, he dealt with it somewhat more forcefully than his sovereign, throttling the guy, forcing him to the ground, and breaking his tooth, until the Mounties arrived to rescue the assailant from the PM. But, had the London and Ottawa intruders been gunned down by SWAT teams, I cannot imagine for a moment either the British or Canadian Parliament rising to applaud such an outcome. This was a repulsive act by Congress.

  Miriam Carey is already forgotten, and the lawyer her family hired has now, conveniently, been jailed for a bad debt. I am not one for cheap historical analogies: My mother spent four of her childhood years under Nazi occupation, and it is insulting to her and millions of others who know the real thing to bandy overheated comparisons. But there is a despotic trend in American government. Too many of our rulers and their enforcers reflexively see the citizenry primarily as a threat. Which is why the tautness of one’s buns is now probable cause, and why in Congress the so-called people’s representatives’ first instinct is to stand and cheer the death of a defenseless woman.

  In 2014, the city of Deming and Hidalgo County settled with Mr. Eckert for $1.6 million. After nine months of federal obfuscation
, Ms. Carey’s family launched a wrongful-death suit against the Secret Service and the Capitol Police.

  1This is the Trayvon Martin shooting referred to in “E Pluribus Composite.”

  V

  HOMELAND SECURITY

  PRIORITIES

  The National Post, July 29, 2002

  EVERY SO OFTEN, the name of Deena Gilbey crosses my radar screen.

  Who’s Deena Gilbey? Well, she’s one of several hundred non-U.S. citizens widowed on September 11, 2001. Her husband, Paul, was a trader with Euro-Brokers on the eighty-fourth floor of the World Trade Center and that Tuesday morning he stayed behind to help evacuate people. He was a hero on a day when America sorely needed them, having been thoroughly let down by those to whom the defense of the nation was officially entrusted. Mr. Gilbey was a British subject on a long-term work visa that allowed his dependents to live in America but not to work themselves. The Gilbeys bought a house in Chatham Township and had two children, born in New Jersey and thus U.S. citizens. All perfectly legal and valid.

  But then came September 11. And a few days afterwards Mrs. Gilbey received a form letter from the Immigration and Naturalization Service1 informing her that, upon her husband’s death, his visa had also expired and with it her right to remain in the country. She was now, they informed her, an illegal alien and liable to be “arrested and deported.”

  Think about that. On the morning of Wednesday, September 12, some INS departmental head calls the staff into his office and says, “Wow, that was a wild ride yesterday. But the priority of the United States Government right now is to find out how many legally resident foreigners have been widowed and see how quickly we can traumatize them further.”

  And maybe someone says, “Well, you know, boss, maybe leaning on Deena Gilbey really isn’t where we ought to be concentrating our energies right now. I mean, we did after all issue visas to every single one of those nineteen terrorists. Given that the fellows we let in then went on to murder Mrs. Gilbey’s husband, should we really be adding insult to the great injury we’ve done her?”

  But, if anybody did say that, he was presumably put on sick leave, and the rest of the feds went back to business as usual.

  As on September 11 itself, when the FBI, INS, FAA, and the other hotshot money-no-object acronyms flopped out big time, it was the local guys who came through. The Police Chief of Chatham, New Jersey, was outraged by the Government’s harassment of Mrs. Gilbey, and the British press picked it up, and eventually it came to the attention of the President, who in late October signed special legislation for the hundreds of law-abiding widows and children in Mrs. Gilbey’s position.

  And then a week or so back, it all came up again. It turned out that the President’s special legislation designed to cover Mrs. Gilbey’s situation did not, in fact, cover it. The U.S.A. Patriot Act allows foreign-born widows and children of 9/11 to apply for permanent residency—the famous “Green Card.” But Mrs. Gilbey was told by the INS she didn’t qualify because “her paperwork had not reached a certain level of the process.”

  Look at that phrase. Cut it out. Enlarge it. Pin it to the wall. Suspend it from the ceiling, lie on the carpet, and try to figure out what it means. It is, as they say in Mrs. Gilbey’s native land, bollocks. It is bollocks forward, sideways, and back-to-front. It is bollocks on stilts. It does not address the reality of the situation—that Mrs. Gilbey is the mother of American citizens, that her husband died saving the lives of American citizens, that he is buried in a vast mass grave on American soil, that his relict is no threat to anyone, and that the sensible thing to say is, “Oh, let’s just stamp the thing and give it to her. Every minute we waste on Deena Gilbey is a minute we could be devoting to the guys we should really be looking into.”

  It is the kind of bollocks that makes you wish that Mohammed Atta, to whom the United States Government did give a visa, had hung a left at the last minute and ploughed through whichever office the INS twerp who wrote that letter was working in.

  The reason “the paperwork had not reached a certain level” was because, after applying for his Green Card way back in 1994, Paul Gilbey had then changed jobs—which meant he had to go to the back of the line and start from scratch. At the INS, having different U.S. companies competing for your services is cause for punishment. Regular folks don’t change jobs every decade, they join a government agency when they’re twenty-one and stay there for the next four decades until they retire on lavish benefits at taxpayer expense. So the Gilbey paperwork, having painstakingly climbed to the second level of the INS ladder, was now back down the garbage chute at the bottom.

  Facing deportation yet again, Mrs. Gilbey this time lined up the support of not just the Chatham Police Chief but also New Jersey Senator Jon Corzine, Tony Blair, and even Hillary Rodham Clinton. And so last week it was announced that, barring the INS discovering further pretexts for deporting her, she’ll be allowed to stay.

  Meantime, while Mrs. Gilbey has been frantically petitioning senators and prime ministers, Saudi citizens have been enjoying the benefits of a service called “Visa Express,” under which they can be processed for admission to the United States without having to be seen by any U.S. consular official. Instead, they are, to all intents and purposes, approved by their Saudi travel agent. Fifteen out of nineteen of the September 11 terrorists were Saudis. Yet ten months after September 11 this program was still up and running, still shoveling out pre-approved visas.

  Visa Express was a pilot program, unique to Saudi Arabia. But, even before September 11, why would you pilot a fast-track admissions program in a country profoundly anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, anti-western? What do the American people gain by it?

  The State Department now claims to have shut the program down, but not before revealing the surreal immigration preferences of the United States Government: Give them the best part of a decade and they cannot complete Paul Gilbey’s Green Card application, but give ’em two minutes and the word of a Saudi travel agent and they’re happy to issue fast-track visas to three of Mr. Gilbey’s murderers—Salem al-Hamzi, Khalid al-Mihdar, and Abdul Aziz al-Omari. Mr. Gilbey’s widow needs to go through CIA clearance to remain in the country, but no such burdens weigh on the compatriots of his murderers. Indeed, the Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said on June 10, 2002, that even if the Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force believes “the applicants may pose a threat to national security,” that’s “insufficient to permit a consular official to deny a visa.”

  You can fly a jet at full speed into the bureaucratic mindset but it just bounces off, barely felt. The INS has no real idea who’s within America’s borders. One reason they have no idea is because it takes them a decade to process a routine Green Card application by a highly-employable, high-earning, law-abiding citizen of America’s closest ally. That’s a joke, and it brings the entire system into disrepute. But that’s big, sprawling, inefficient, your-paperwork-has-not-reached-a-certain-level government for you. The INS failed to get Messrs al-Hamzi, al-Mihdar, and al-Omari, but they did get Deena Gilbey. Congratulations, guys.

  We talk about government “intelligence failure” as if it’s something to do with misreading satellite intercepts between Peshawar and Aden. But the “intelligence failure” of September 11 is more basic than that, a failure of intelligence in the moderately-competent grade-school sense.

  And nothing we’ve learned in the last ten months—from Mohammed Atta’s posthumous flight-school visa issued by the INS six months after he’d reduced the World Trade Center to rubble to last week’s very belated suspension of the Saudi fast-track—suggests that federal officialdom has changed or is even willing to change. Paul Gilbey is buried in the dust of Ground Zero. At the very least America should also bury with him the bureaucratic inertia symbolized by his decade-long Green Card application.

  1The INS was dismantled by the Homeland Security Act of 2002, and in 2003 its responsibilities were divided among three agencies of the new Department of Hom
eland Security.

  CHOC AND AWE

  The Corner, April 24, 2011

  I AM LOOKING this bright Easter morn at a Department of Homeland Security “Custody Receipt for Seized Property and Evidence.” Late last night, crossing the Quebec/Vermont border, my children had two boxes of “Kinder Eggs” (“Est. Dom. Value $7.50”) confiscated by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

  Don’t worry, it’s for their own safety. I had no idea that the United States is the only nation on the planet (well, okay, excepting North Korea and Saudi Arabia and one or two others) to ban Kinder Eggs. According to the CBP:

  Kinder Chocolate Eggs are hollow milk chocolate eggs about the size of a large hen’s egg usually packaged in a colorful foil wrapper. They are a popular treat and collector’s item during holiday periods in various countries around the world, including those in Europe, South America and even Canada. A toy within the egg is contained in an oval-shaped plastic capsule. The toy requires assembly and each egg contains a different toy. Many of the toys that have been tested by the Consumer Product Safety Commission in the past were determined to present a choking hazard for young children.

  And yet oddly enough generations of European and Latin American children remain unchoked. The very name “Kinder” is German for “children.” (There was a BBC telly series a couple of decades back called Die Kinder—“the children”—whose title initially confused me because I assumed it was some sort of Die Hard sequel, with Bruce Willis re-tooled for the caring Nineties.)

  Gotta love that “even Canada,” by the way: Is that an implied threat that Kinder Egg consumption is incompatible with participation in NORAD or membership of NAFTA?

  The Food and Drug Administration has issued an import alert for Kinder Eggs, because they are a confectionery product with a non-nutritive object imbedded in it. As in years past, CBP, the Food and Drug Administration and CPSC work in close collaboration to ensure the safety of imported goods by examining, sampling and testing products that may present such import safety hazards. Last year, CBP officers discovered more than 25,000 of these banned chocolate eggs. More than 2,000 separate seizures were made of this product.