by Rand Paul
Nixon’s no-knock warrants were initially limited to federal law enforcement agents and cops in Washington, D.C., but were meant to be a model of a nationwide plan. Whatever Nixon’s long-term hopes for it were, in the short run the bill unfairly targeted the poor in every possible regard. Then as now, the poor made up the largest percentage of the population of our nation’s capital.
The outcome was predictable. Balko writes about the aftermath of the passing of Nixon’s crime bill: “[But] then a curious thing happened. A few years later, stories began to emerge about out-of-control federal drug cops ripping down doors and terrorizing people, often without a warrant, and frequently finding no drugs or contraband at all.”5
Rolling Stone published perhaps the most famous of these “raids gone wrong” stories. It was titled, appropriately for its era, “Death in the Wilderness: The Justice Department’s Killer Nark Strike Force,” and was written by Joe Eszterhas. It tells the story of Dirk Dickenson, a twenty-four-year-old hippie who was shot fleeing from a heavily armed SWAT team who had stormed his Humboldt County, California, cabin.
A police informant had told federal narcotics agents that Dickenson was running a major drug operation that included a PCP lab. The raid included agents from the ATF, the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (the BNDD was the DEA of its day), and, of course, the IRS (what would a raid be without them?). Half of the team arrived at Dickenson’s cabin in a Huey helicopter, the other half by car. The team in the car hid in the woods surrounding the cabin to provide cover for the assault team in the helicopter. Agents also brought along several reporters to document the event—it would, they thought, be good PR. One reporter wrote that the raid resembled “an assault on an enemy prison camp in Vietnam.” Dickenson was not armed. The landing of the helicopter had frightened him so that—imagine a Huey helicopter landing unannounced in your backyard and you get the picture—he took off running. He didn’t hear the command to stop and was shot in the back. “They said nothing,” Ezsterhas wrote. “Their faces were blank and waxy. They aimed and fired. He heard the gunshots and saw the glop of his own blood. He was dying…”
There was no PCP lab. Cops found two small bags of marijuana, some peyote buttons, and two LSD tablets.
Joe Ezsterhas’s article became part of the Congressional Record,6 and the story of Dirk Dickenson and others like it so disturbed America that when Sam Ervin took to the floor of the Senate again the people listened. In 1975, Gerald Ford signed the law repealing no-knock warrants.
This would be a much better story if that was the end of no-knock warrants. It wasn’t.
As in a horror movie, they keep coming back to life.
By the early 1980s, SWAT had inspired a network television show, a magazine, and a hit song. By the mid-1990s, there would be a SWAT video game franchise and a number of reality shows based on SWAT, including one that featured a SWAT team in Detroit that gained national attention for the wrong reason.7 In May 2010, the Detroit SWAT team in full battle gear entered a ground-floor apartment through an open door. They threw a flash-bang grenade that landed so close to a little girl it singed her blanket. Then they shot and killed seven-year-old Aiyana Mo’nay Stanley-Jones as she slept on a couch. Her grandmother sat a few feet away in a chair watching TV. The police were executing a warrant for a man suspected of murder who lived in the apartment above.
An A&E film crew from the TV show The First 48 was filming the raid. The show’s premise is the need for police to solve a crime in forty-eight hours or the case will go cold. The murder for which the warrant was issued was seventeen hours old. The clock was ticking, the cameras were rolling, and Aiyana was shot in the head because of it. The leader of the SWAT team had been featured on the show before, and the bullet that killed Aiyana came from his gun.
Still, thanks to Madison Avenue and Hollywood spin, America loved and felt safe that SWAT was there to protect us, but SWAT was never about protection. Though the word “attack” might have been dropped from the team’s original name, it hadn’t been dropped from its mission. SWAT teams are specifically trained as use-of-force specialists.
I don’t know about you, but “use-of-force specialists” does not sound like who I want patrolling my street.
In 1981, Congress sprinkled Miracle-Gro on SWAT. That year they passed the Military Cooperation and Law Enforcement Act. In what was to be a mutually beneficial relationship in the war on drugs, the government promised (what could go wrong there?) that the Feds would receive local knowledge and local law enforcement would receive federal intelligence-gathering resources, money, and military equipment.
In the 1990s, the Feds opened the floodgates of military supplies for local police. Bill Clinton’s “1033” program authorized the Department of Defense to allocate to local police Black Hawk and Huey helicopters, grenade launchers, and other military equipment. In 1994, the Justice Department began funding surveillance technology and other military-level security systems for local police. By 1997, 1.2 million pieces of military equipment had been transferred to local police departments. By 1999, that number had jumped to 3.4 million. All of it was in direct opposition to the Third Amendment.
Then came September 11, 2001.
In the aftermath of the terrorist attack, George W. Bush signed the Patriot Act and with a stroke of his pen brought back the no-knock warrant. If Bill Clinton stomped on the Third Amendment, George Bush trampled the Fourth.
The Patriot Act also authorized wide use of “sneak and peek” and “sneak and steal” warrants. Officially called Delayed-Notice Search Warrants, sneak and peek warrants allow law enforcement to enter your home legally without notifying you right away. In other words, agents can sneak into your house or business, root around at will, and not notify you about it until months later. Even worse are sneak and steal warrants, which allow cops or agents to enter your home without your knowledge and remove what they deem as evidence without telling you. Even if they don’t physically take anything from your home or place of business or other property, they’re allowed to riffle through your mail, search your computer, and even install surveillance devices. There have even been cases in which agents ransacked the premises to make it look like a burglary to cover their tracks.8
Sneak and peek and sneak and steal warrants are supposed to be used in the fight against terrorism, but very few are used in that manner. In fact, they are overwhelmingly used to find evidence of illegal drugs, mostly marijuana. According to the latest government report9 detailing the numbers of sneak and peek warrants issued, out of a total of 6,775 requests, 5,093 were used in drug cases. Only thirty-one were actually used to fight terrorism (the remaining were used in investigations of other crimes, mostly fraud).
Under President Obama, the two-pronged attack on the Third and Fourth Amendments has grown exponentially. In 2013 alone, the 1033 program handed military equipment worth more than half a billion dollars over to local law enforcement. Today sneak and peek warrants make up fully 10 percent of all warrants issued by the federal government.10
Last year, the Homeland Security Grant Program instituted after 9/11 gave local police departments almost a billion dollars in “counterterrorism funds,” money that was used to buy drones, among other things. It also funds the Suspicious Activity Reporting (SAR) program, which sounds to me like something out of a dystopian novel. Operating in cities around the country, the program compiles “see something, say something” reports into a database. What constitutes suspicious behavior? The answer is fuzzy at best. In my own home state of Kentucky, a list of suspicious behavior the Homeland Security Office published includes people who avoid eye contact, people who are overdressed for the weather, and overloaded vehicles.11
My God, you’d have to report every teenager in the state.
Then there’s the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant (JAG) Program, which provides funding to local police departments for, among other things, body armor, helicopters, and joint task force operations. The grant was named after a twenty-two-year
-old New York City police officer who was shot and killed by drug dealers while he was protecting a witness to a drug case. I’m all for cops getting the equipment they need to protect themselves: bulletproof vests, the best appropriate firearms, and all the training possible. Money from the Byrne grant also funded a SWAT drug raid in Tulia, Texas, that resulted in the arrest of forty African Americans—10 percent of the town’s black population—and produced no drugs and no weapons. But the team did manage to wreck many homes and the lives of far too many people.12
The thing about federal money is, once it starts flowing it keeps flowing until it floods any hope of personal liberty. By 1999, 90 percent of the police departments in municipalities of over 50,000 people and 75 percent of the departments in towns under 50,000 had paramilitary police units, according to Peter Kraska, professor and department chair of the School of Justice at Eastern Kentucky University. Today, more than 600 cities have mine-resistant ambush protected vehicles (MRAPs) that weigh over 20 tons. According to a statistic cited in a Cato Institute report, currently there are upward of 150 SWAT raids every day in America.
Every single day.13
In his article titled “Militarization and Policing—Its Relevance to 21st Century Police,” Professor Kraska, who was one of the first to write on this subject, states that such a proliferation of SWAT raids would have been unthinkable just twenty years ago. “It is critical to recognize that these are not forced reaction situations necessitating use of force specialists; instead they are the result of police departments choosing to use an extreme and highly dangerous tactic, not for terrorists or hostage-takers, but for small-time drug possessors and dealers.”
How ridiculously small-time? Well, in 2010 in Florida, a SWAT team engaged in a series of raids on barbershops. They found a few instances of barbering without a license, but little else.14 Many other raids, however, aren’t nearly as harmless.
In spring 2014, a SWAT team executing a no-knock warrant threw a concussion grenade through Alecia Phonesavanh’s window in Janesville, Wisconsin. The grenade exploded in the crib of Alecia’s nineteen-month-old son, Bounkham Phonesavanh Jr. Part of the infant’s nose was destroyed, his face received extensive injuries, and a hole was blown in his chest wall. For weeks Bounkham languished in a coma. Though the boy survived, the family was saddled with $1 million in hospital bills.15 The police found no drugs.16
Police use of flash-bang grenades has gotten so commonplace that cops in Little Rock, Arkansas, used them in over 80 percent of their 112 raids between 2011 and 2013, nearly all of which were conducted in black neighborhoods, according to ProPublica, which cites an ACLU survey.17
SWAT raids also kill police. In December 2013, a Sommerville, Texas, SWAT team executed a no-knock warrant on the trailer home of Henry Goedrich Magee. Magee and his girlfriend were sleeping at the time. The police used flash-bang grenades that startled Magee, so he grabbed a rifle he kept next to his bed, then shot and killed the first intruder through the door. The “intruder” was thirty-one-year-old sheriff’s deputy Adam Sowders. A grand jury believed Magee, and the capital murder charge against him was dropped.
This has to stop. The military imagery out of Ferguson and other American towns is not only an affront to the local citizens but a worldwide embarrassment for the United States. How can we pretend to be a country of constitutional law when we allow tanks to roll over our constitution?
We’ve veered off the constitutional rails, and there’s a wreck around the corner. The good news is there’s a way to get back on track. With my staff, I am working on legislation that would stop the flow of military equipment to local police. The Stop Militarizing Our Law Enforcement Act would restrict what equipment can be transferred or bought through the 1033 program, the Department of Homeland Security Preparedness Grant Program, and the DOJ’s Byrne Grant Program. It will prohibit the transfer of militarized weaponry that was never designed to be in the hands of law enforcement—including mine-resistant ambush protected vehicles and weaponized drones. If local law enforcement is convinced that these items are necessary to protect their communities, then they should pay for them with local tax dollars and be held accountable for the expense by the people they serve.
If I am elected president of the United States, the Constitution will again be the law of the land. There will be no government overreach by my administration. I will continue to fight every day to restrain government and promote personal freedom. That’s my promise.
12
The War on Christians
Any country that fosters the war on Christianity or, for that matter, any country that allows an unchecked hatred for the United States should be excluded from receiving foreign aid. They get not one penny. Period.
When Naghmeh Abedini first came to my Senate office and told me of her husband Saeed’s persecution, it reminded me of the Christian martyrs during the Roman Empire. I couldn’t help thinking of the extraordinary courage and faith it must take to evangelize in an Islamic country today.
Naghmeh and Saeed’s story begins like a fairy tale. Naghmeh was born in Iran but grew up in Boise, Idaho. There she became a Christian. “That’s the most beautiful part of America for me,” she told a reporter from the website Townhall. “I had the freedom to choose my religion.” In 2001, she returned to Iran. She was called there, she says, to minister to Muslim women. At the time, Saeed, who had also converted to Christianity, was preaching in an underground Christian church. “As a young woman I always prayed, ‘Lord, I can’t marry someone who is mediocre,’” she told Christian Broadcast News.
The happy couple soon married in a ceremony that drew hundreds of Iranian Christians. It also drew the attention of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.
Undeterred, Saeed carried his message often to Iran, where he helped found scores of underground Christian churches and orphanages. In the summer of 2012, on what he thought was a routine trip, he was arrested and sent to Evin Prison. What had started as a fairy tale for Saeed and Naghmeh became a nightmare.
Naghmeh is young and striking looking, with jet-black hair. I can still see the tears streaming down her face as she told me that Saeed had been beaten so severely in prison that he had to be hospitalized. She told me about the daily threats her husband received from fellow inmates and how he lives in fear for his life. As a father, it was especially heartbreaking to think of Naghmeh and Saeed’s two small children who continue to grow as the memory of their father fades.
I promised her then that I would do whatever it took to rally Christians to pray and call for Saeed’s release. It is a promise I’ve kept to this day. I wrote this letter on January 24, 2014, to President Hassan Rouhani of Iran:
I am writing to you today to urge you to commute the sentence of Pastor Saeed Abedini and release him from prison. I have recently met with his wife, Naghmeh, and she is very concerned for her husband’s well-being. His health is deteriorating and he is apparently under constant threat of harm from both prison personnel and other inmates at Rajaei Shahr prison.
I wish to remain cautiously optimistic regarding the recent diplomatic progress between our two nations. However, I must point out that if something were to happen to Pastor Abedini while he is incarcerated, any goodwill forged over the past few months would likely evaporate. Conversely, granting clemency to Pastor Abedini and allowing him to return to the United States would do much to create a positive atmosphere that would reflect well on future discussions.
Cooperation and trust are built one gesture at a time and actions speak louder than words.
Along with the letter, I introduced a resolution in the Senate that calls for the immediate release of this American pastor. As of this writing, Saeed still suffers in an Iranian jail.
Iran is only one of several countries that are complicit in this wrongdoing. Throughout this chapter I will present evidence of a persecution of Christians the likes of which has not been seen since the Roman Empire. The proof is clear, inescapable, and overwhelming: there is a worldwide
war on Christianity, and it’s a war that’s being funded by your tax dollars.
Let’s start with Syria.
I have a friend who went to Duke University School of Medicine with me. Though he was born here in America, his family is Syrian Christian. I once asked him how long his people have been Christian. “A lot longer than yours,” he said with a friendly smirk. Many Christians of European ancestry forget that Christianity in the Middle East preceded Christianity in northern Europe by several hundred years. In some villages in Syria they still speak Aramaic, the language of Christ.
There have been Christians in Syria since St. Paul converted on the road to Damascus. Just north of Damascus is a town called Maalula, or the “land of martyrs.”1 From there, modern-day stories of persecuted Christians filter out to the world. In September 2012, an armed Islamist group went from house to house, terrorizing the occupants and destroying sacred Christian images. In one of the homes, they came across three Greek Catholics, including Sarkis el Zakhm.
“Convert to Islam or die,” the gunmen ordered.
“I am a Christian,” Sarkis said, “and if you want to kill me because I am a Christian, do it.”
Those were Sarkis’s last words.
Not long after Sarkis was killed, a rebel gang in Maalula swept through town forcing Christians to convert at gunpoint and slitting the throat of a Christian man in front of his fiancée.
Then there’s the story of Father Frans.
As recently as 2011, the Old City in Homs, Syria, had a Christian population of 60,000. When the civil war began, the city was a rebel stronghold. It was also a city under siege, isolated by Bashar al-Assad’s army. As food and other basic supplies grew short, Christians were beaten, robbed, and finally driven from their homes—according to conservative estimates there are a half million Syrian Christian war refugees. But even as their numbers dwindled in their home country, hatred grew toward the ones who remained.