Misdemeanor Trials

by Milton Schacter

  We walked around the building and he had a key that opened a big steel door. There were steps leading down and I followed him. We got to a room that had no windows and cement walls. There was a single metal table and several metal chairs. The FBI person told me to sit, and a few minutes later another person came in.

  “Brian, this is the fellow wearing the vest. He is cooperative. He believes there is a countdown device and deactivation is necessary right now. He's all yours.”

  The FBI agent left the room and the hasps of steel on the metal door, and the metal click of the lock on the door confirmed that we were sealed in in the room.

  “My name is Brian Westerfield. I'm from the bomb squad and I have seen vests before and I am confident we can deactivate it. Can you take off your jacket?” I stood up and took off my jacket.

  “Turn around.” I turned around. He said, “There is a small LED countdown device on the right shoulder. It shows there are about twenty minutes before it reaches zero. We have plenty of time, so take a deep breath while I try to figure out how this vest was put together.” He began to walk around, touching certain parts of the vest, following the wires. He said, “This does not look like a very sophisticated setup, but we won't take any chances. Where are you from?”

  “Fremont.”

  “What’s your name?” asked Westerfield.

  “Mike.”

  “Your full name,” said Westerfield

  “Mike Madani.”

  “Been in this country very long?” asked Westerfield.

  “All my life. I don't know how I got caught up in this. I'm a Muslim, but I am totally locally produced. I am an American. I think I have been primed all my life and when they came to me with this vest, I think I was steamrollered into it.”

  “What made you come here?”

  “I changed my mind. One thing about America is it clears your mind. It may take a while. It sure took some time with me. You start to think in practical terms and can decide what is in your own best interest. Offing myself and going to meet 72 virgins are fanciful notions. I would be suffering their PMS every day of the year. I just want to go see my girlfriend, crack a beer and watch the playoffs. I don't care about jihad.”

  The phone in the room rang. Brian picked up the phone and muttered a few “yeahs” and “Okays” and hung up. He turned to me.

  “Seems your story is credible. We received reports about explosions in New York, Miami, St. Paul and other places. All about the same time. We'll get you out of this.”

  Westerfield told me to sit down. He opened his small bag that had some tools and removed a wire cutter. He put on some glasses that had a magnifying attachment and he came toward me. He sat down opposite to me, lowered the magnifying glass and bent his head toward the vest. “This is a rather simple blasting device. There are three wires, red, black and green. I am going to cut the red wire that supplies power to the blasting cap. This should cut off any power to the blasting cap. After that we can cut the cable securing the vest so that we can remove the vest. Are you ready?”

  I told him, “Yes.” I was confident and relieved that this would all be over soon. Brian took the cutter and unbundled the red, black and green wires. The cutters surrounded the red wire and he cut it. I could see the whole thing happening. The explosion from the front of my vest sent the hundreds of marble sized ball bearings towards Brian. The balls hit Brian and forced his body against the table, ripping through him, shredding his chest like cheese. I watched from just over my own head as my neck was severed from my body and sent to the ceiling of the room. The vest and my body were torn into such small pieces I could not see anything that resembled me. I did not feel anything. The room’s walls were sprayed with blood and small pieces of flesh. The force of the explosion bounced off of the wall and once again hit Brian’s body and my body so that there was nothing left of either of us but hamburger. The explosion stopped. There was no sound. And you can tell my brethren, there are no 72 virgins. There is only black.

  That week there were suicide bombers in New York, Miami, Chicago, St. Paul, New Orleans, Seattle, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Cleveland.

  CHAPTER TWO

  INAGURATION

  "This great nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper.”

  – F.D.R.

  On this cruelly brisk clear and cold January morning, she turned to the podium and looked out over at least a hundred thousand people, packed closely together, breathing and creating their own fog. The applause was loud and passionate. She had just been sworn in as the President of the United States. She had promised during the campaign to engage the country in a robust return to political and economic democracy. She had a great deal on her plate. The applause died slowly and she began.

  “My fellow Americans. I accept with great humility the responsibilities that have come with the office of the President of the United States. Like all Presidents before me, I am a temporary holder of an office that I respect and revere. I will use what influence I gain to advance economic and political freedom, which have been slowly corralled by the encroachment of government on the daily lives of working people, entrepreneurs, institutions of liberty, and our individual, personal freedom.

  “The country began as a group of people, working to advance themselves and their families. This country was founded on the principle of individual self-reliance, supported by the family. Families entered contracts with other families and other people. They did so with a shake of the hand in a bargain that produced a profit for both parties. People went about producing goods and services that others wanted, and sold them so that their families could prosper. They were motivated by a desire to improve their own lives, and their own self-interest was constrained by another part of our culture that required honesty, integrity, and hard work in order for them to achieve their goals. In the following days, and months, and years, I will bring a heightened awareness of the need for the return to those simple and universal values that invariably lead to the common good and the prosperity of all.

  “The engine of success is the unfettered entrepreneur. When caged only by the requirement to maintain honesty in transactions, he or she takes a huge step toward a better life for all Americans. To strive to have a willing buyer and a willing seller, and to realize that both parties to any transaction will always “trade-up” will be a guarantees more goods and services for this country than existed before the transaction. But trade, whether international, or between the buyer and seller at the neighborhood lemonade stand, needs an environment where it can flourish. We have a past which has been unmatched in its economic success and prosperity. But that success has also been the anchor that has eaten away at the greatness of this nation. We have the highest corporate tax rate in the world. Corporations leave their money in overseas accounts, not because they do not want America to succeed, but because it is too costly to their company. Repatriation of foreign funds to this country is against each corporation’s mandated responsibility to act in the best interest of their stockholders. Businesses are burdened with taxes and regulations that are unnecessary, and laws that punish success. These burdens have created walls that must be torn down. In the last eight years there have been millions of pages of new regulations that have stymied growth in this country. These regulations were not necessary in the first two hundred years of its existence. The promulgators of such restrictions on American prosperity have a vision of the future where people live in thatched huts, using only renewable energy for heat and cooking, while they pick parasites off of each other, eating sustainable algae cakes while organizing a bake sale for the Guatemalan water snake. This is not where I want this country to go. I will order that all regulations over the last Administration costing this nation over one hundred million dollars will be immediately rescinded. All others will go into a review, and their necessity questioned. I will ask Congress to immediately begin the legislative process to lower corporate and individual tax rates while we work on a way to reform
the tax code. We may be able to remove some of the impediments to success. Success is the product of hard work and creativity.

  “But that is not all. Imagination, hard work, creativity and the power of the mind, all require motivation that sparks individual progress and success. This need to provide for yourself, for your family, and for those you love, must be restored and moved away from the policies of redistribution that have dominated government over the past decades. When a person is given something, be it a monthly welfare check or a cell phone, or subsidized housing, it does not have the same value as when it is earned. To earn something, one must work. People need to work. The image of the American is a steely-eyed man with his strength strained, as he or she is focused on success. But that image is tarnished by the growth of the welfare state in this country, and all other countries,. Over half the population of this country is receiving some kind of subsidy. The most pressing medical problem among the poor is obesity, not inadequate nutrition. It is the welfare state that must be curtailed to include only those who must have it. During my Administration, I want that able bodied American who has a free cell phone, receives welfare, and who wakes up in his subsidized home, to look at himself in the mirror, with a bit of fear in his eye and remark, 'I may have to get a job.'”

  At 48,000 feet over the sovereign airspace of the country of Iran, on a purposely open radio frequency that anyone with an aviation frequency receiver would be able to hear, heard the words:

  “Raptor 1, this is Raptor 2, 15 minutes from target Domed Decree.”

  “Raptor 2, Roger, we have a GO on target. Resume your own navigation, release on target.”

  “Raptor 1, this is Raptor 3, 15 minutes from target Xanadu”

  “Raptor 3, Roger, we have a GO on target. Resume your own navigation, release on target.”

  Six voices in sequence transmitted their time to target to six other raptors, each with a distinct name for each of the targets. Raptor 1 transmitted the same instructions to Raptor 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8, “Resume own navigation, release on target.” In fifteen minutes the relations between nations would change.

  “One of the challenges we face as a nation is to regain our independence from the whims of foreign oil-producing nations, and to unravel our own nation's prohibitions against extracting the engine of liberty lying deep and unmolested under our own soil. We must free ourselves from the complex relationships that require that we consider all of our international relations in the context of their impact on the free flow of oil to our nation. Dependence of foreign oil has resulted in our country, the strongest, the most free, and most prosperous nation in the history of man, retreating and cowering before the foreign atrocities perpetrated by movements hostile to our culture, lifestyle, prosperity and freedom. In the coming weeks we will cooperate with Congress and open up all available oil leases in the Gulf. We will begin to extract oil from Alaska and transport that oil to refineries in the continental United States for the distribution to all the people of this country. We will apply only reasonable regulation to the extraction of shale oil, and fracking will no longer be a bad word. We will begin soon, and complete in record time, the remaining portions of the Keystone Pipeline that will insure the free flow of oil from our historical friend and trading partner, Canada. Oil prices will decrease as well as gasoline prices. Americans will be freer to travel. They will have more dollars in their pocket. We will no longer have our foreign policy dictated by the vagaries of the foreign oil markets, or controlled by forces hostile to the American way of life.

  “And we must continue to be vigilant as chaos is sweeping the Middle Eastern and Arab worlds. Tunisia is in political disarray and can barely control its borders. Libya hardly exists. Tripoli is not the capital of a country, but the weak point of arbitration for tribes and militias in far-flung desert reaches. Egypt wallows in a political stasis in which the government has trouble functioning, ideological divisions between the military and the Islamists split the country and violence and vigilantism abound. The Sinai Peninsula has become a mini-Afghanistan. The government of Yemen no longer functions. Syria is in a full-fledged civil war with over 100,000 dead. Iraq, too, barely exists as a state, and high intensity violence is a continuing and increasing feature of life in Iraq as ISIS gains more territory. Iraq is insufficiently supported by the United States, but that will change as we transfer arms and intelligence to the Peshmerga. Bahrain and Jordan are much weakened states compared to previous decades. These areas of neglect have fostered the cancer of Islamic extremists, which has metastasized into other areas of the world, including our country, where we are reminded daily of the dangers that lurk around the corners in our cities. Significantly, our national security problems will not be solved anytime soon after so many years of neglect and indifference.

  “In the United States of America alone, since 1972, there have been 74 terrorist acts and over 3,102 innocent persons brutally murdered by Muslim terrorists. Many of the attacks are engraved into the history of this country, and innocent citizens injured in those attacks awake each morning with broken bodies, shattered limbs, and spirits damaged from the extra energy they need to live their daily lives. A great deal of the responsibility for those injuries can be laid at the feet of a government neglecting its responsibility to protect its citizens. When we look back on those attacks, we should remember February 1993 when Islamic terrorists detonated a truck bomb under the New York City World Trade center, killing six and injuring over 100 people; the World Trade Center was again assaulted in September 2001, and 3000 people were killed by Islamic terrorists flying hijacked commercial airplanes; in November 2009, 31 persons were killed by an American Muslim army officer at Fort Hood while shouting Allah Akbar; in April 2013, 3 persons were killed in Boston by a ball bearing laden explosive, and an additional 264 gravely injured by Muslim terrorists. In the tally of murders by Islamic terrorists we need to include terrorist’s attacks in France where 12 innocent journalists were murdered in cold blood by a conspiracy of Islamic Terrorists using AK-47s. We have seen the video of bloody hands of an Islamic terrorist in the United Kingdom after murdering a police officer. In December of 2014, 132 children were murdered by two gunmen in Pakistan while the gunmen shouted praises to Allah; in December bodies of 230 persons were found in a mass grave after execution by ISIS terrorists. In December, 150 women were executed by ISIS for refusing to be brides of caliphate Jihadis; in December, 2 person in Australia were killed by a radical Muslim cleric proclaiming his faith in Allah. The ISIS capture of Fallujah in Anbar province led to the indiscriminate murder by ISIS. They now control Kirkuk, Mosul, and the occupation of Ramadi is not a setback, it is a victory for ISIS. The slaughter of Christians in captured areas is graphic evidence this is a war of religion. Terrorism is an ongoing and daily event in countries of the Middle East. This is a new type of warfare for our country, but it has been going on for decades. We must respond in a way that identifies and kills or captures the Islamic terrorists until they no longer exist as a force. There is a saying that we in Western civilization have watches, but the terrorists have time. That saying no longer applies. They no longer have time.

  “There is a fear of labeling the terrorist acts as Islamic terror. That would imply that there would be a backlash against person of the Muslim faith, or persons of Middle Eastern extraction. But I caution you, we don't need to paint a broad brush against a group of people who are Muslim, or Middle Eastern persons who have not been terrorists. And we can do that. We will pursue, attack, and incarcerate or kill persons who are, in fact, Islamic terrorists. And we will do that wherever they are, and we all know where they are, and we know who they are. They carry weapons, behead innocents, kill women who are not properly covered, perpetrate honor killings, stone adulterers, set IED 's in the paths of American soldiers, support suicide bombers, kill homosexuals, and they carry and use weapons in pursuit of their Jihadist goals. We will go to the places where they are, whether in this country or elsewhere in the world, and kill or capture the
m. We will isolate and punish those countries that support terrorism. No Muslim or middle eastern inhabitant of this country, who does not share common cause with the Jihadists, need fear unwarranted attack from citizens of this country. But I will now tell any Islamic terrorist in this country, or Islamic terrorist in any territory of the world that threatens American citizens, each of you, and all of you are at risk of serious injury or death or a lifetime in a 8 foot by 8 foot cell with one window from which you will not be able to see the sun for the rest of your life. It does not take two sides to end this war. It takes only one. One side will surrender, or one side will have total victory. We will never surrender.

  “In the last months of the previous administration, the last eighty four Islamic Terrorists who resided at Guantanamo Bay were pardoned and transported from Guantanamo Bay to countries in the Middle East. Those Islamic Extremists were the most psychopathically violent of all the extremists captured in battle. From today and into the future, I promise you that each and every one of those violent extremists will be tracked down and killed or returned to Guantanamo Bay where they will spend the rest of their life, or until the powers of Middle Eastern aggressors have capitulated to the civilized world.

  “More pressing than any issue facing our nation today is the security of our country and its citizens from the fear of nuclear threats. We as a country have tried in a serious and thoughtful way to encourage nations of the world to step down from any policy that would bring about nuclear threats to other nations, to themselves, and to the United States of America. Our efforts have not produced results. Today irresponsible rogue nations that harbor an intention to damage, destroy and annihilate our allies and western culture have stated in unequivocal terms their intention is to develop nuclear weapons, to build methods of delivery, and to use them against our allies. They have moved along a direct path to develop enriched uranium, combined with designing rockets that can carry these weapons of mass destruction. Such nations, that do not respond to the pressure of the international community, and who reject the rational conclusion that it is not in any nations interest to disrupt the stability that is necessary for citizens of all nations to live without the fear of nuclear proliferation, must be stopped.”