At PJM, Richard Miniter identifies who benefits from the “shooting Iraqi civilians” and other scandal stories suddenly appearing in profusion about the private security contractor Blackwater USA.

Movements of key CIA station personnel in Baghdad—along with most State department diplomats and teams building police stations and schools—have been frozen for the second day in a row, according to a State department source who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Essentially, the CIA, State department and government contractors are stuck inside the International Zone, also known as “the Green Zone,” in Central Baghdad. Even travel inside that walled enclave is somewhat restricted.

Pajamas Media is the first to report that the CIA station is all but motionless—as meetings with informants and Iraqi government officials have been hastily cancelled.

What caused the shut down? Following a firefight between Iraqi insurgents and a Blackwater USA protection detail on Sunday (12:08 PM Baghdad time), Iraqi officials suspended the operating license of the North Carolina-based government contractor. While the Iraqi government is yet to hold a formal hearing on the matter, Blackwater and all it protects remain frozen.

“By jamming up Blackwater, they shut down the movements of the embassy and the [CIA] station,” a State department source told Pajamas Media. He is not cleared to talk to the press.

Blackwater provides Personnel Security Details—or PSDs—for most CIA, State department, and U.S. Agency of International Development officers. In addition, Blackwater’s special-forces veterans guard many of the Provincial Reconstruction Teams—or PRTs—that build schools, clinics, police and fire stations and other structures that house essential Iraqi government services. Work on these vital “hearts and minds” projects has all but stopped across Iraq.

The State department has long insisted on using Blackwater and other private security firms so that its convoys and legations would not be controlled by the Defense department. ...

At least eight Iraqis are reported dead after the Sunday shoot out and some press reports refer to the local casualties as “civilians.”

“Initial press accounts were inaccurate,” said Blackwater USA spokeswoman Anne Tyrell. “The ‘civilians’ reportedly fired upon by Blackwater professionals were in fact armed enemies and Blackwater personnel returned defensive fire. Blackwater regrets any loss of life but this convoy was violently attacked by armed insurgents, not civilians, and our people did their job to defend human life.”

“Blackwater professionals heroically defended American lives in a war zone on Sunday and Blackwater will cooperate with any inquiry into this matter.”

It’s well known in Iraq that dead insurgents become “civilians” as soon as their comrades carry away their AK-47s and spare magazines. Captured al Qaeda manuals detail how militants should use deaths as a propaganda tool. ...

By apparently lifting Blackwater’s license, the democratically elected Iraq government may stall the forward progress created by the Gen. Petraeus’ surge and change in counterinsurgency tactics.

Indeed, some contend that the actions of Iraq’s Ministry of Interior, which supervises police and some intelligence functions, may be influenced by insurgents or even by Iran.

The staffing and internal rules of the Interior ministry were set up by Biyat Jabr, an affable and charming Shia Muslim who once worked for Saddam Hussein. (He was never a member of the Ba’ath party and thus survived de-Ba’athification with ease.)

Jabr is widely believed to be in the pay of Iranian intelligence services, although U.S. officials caution that there is no firm evidence of this charge. Jabr left the ministry in August 2006 and is now Finance Minister, but before he exited he salted the ranks with people loyal to Iran and hostile to the U.S. “Innocents dying [in the Sunday gun battle with Blackwater] is just a pretext,” the same State department source said.

Enemies of the U.S. inside the Interior ministry have been looking to shut down Blackwater for some time. ...

Both the State department and the Congress have signaled that investigations in to Blackwater will begin soon.

The State department hopes to shift blame onto Blackwater’s low-level “trigger pullers,” says the State department source, while Rep. Henry Waxman’s committee is expected to target senior executives at Blackwater and top Bush Administration officials. A perfect storm is set to roil Blackwater.

If Blackwater and other private contractors are shut out of Iraq, Democrats in Congress and Iranian intelligence operatives may have stumbled on a way to end the Iraq War—less than a week after Gen. Petraeus testified that the U.S. is turning the corner.

And sure enough, just as Miniter predicted, here comes the Associated Press with another headline, reading Feds target Blackwater in weapons probe:

Federal prosecutors are investigating whether employees of the private security firm Blackwater USA illegally smuggled into Iraq weapons that may have been sold on the black market and ended up in the hands of a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, officials said Friday.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Raleigh, N.C., is handling the investigation with help from Pentagon and State Department auditors, who have concluded there is enough evidence to file charges, the officials told The Associated Press. ...

In the United States, officials in Washington said the smuggling investigation grew from internal Pentagon and State Department inquiries into U.S. weapons that had gone missing in Iraq. It gained steam after Turkish authorities protested to the U.S. in July that they had seized American arms from the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, rebels. ...

The North Carolina investigation was first brought to light by State Department Inspector General Howard Krongard, who mentioned it, perhaps inadvertently, this week while denying he had improperly blocked fraud and corruption probes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Krongard was accused in a letter by Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, of politically motivated malfeasance, including refusing to cooperate with an investigation into alleged weapons smuggling by a large, unidentified State Department contractor.

The BBC has a story demonstrating that the surrender of common sense to zero tolerance policies in service of therapeutic state paternalism is an international phenomenon.

Supermarket staff refused to sell alcohol to a white-haired 72-year-old man – because he would not confirm he was over 21.

Check-out staff at Morrisons in West Kirby, Wirral, demanded Tony Ralls prove he was old enough to buy his two bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon.

Mr Ralls asked to see the manager who put the wine back on the shelf.

The grandfather-of-three said he had refused to confirm he was over 21 as it was a “stupid question.”

Mr Ralls, a retired insurance firm regional manager, said he expected the store manager to resolve the situation but he was disappointed. ...

The pensioner abandoned his shopping on the conveyor belt and left the store – but not before demanding a complaints form and phone number for Morrisons’ headquarters. ...

A Morrisons spokesman said: “We take our responsibility with regard to selling alcohol very seriously and all our stores operate the Task 21 scheme, which addresses the difficulties our staff face in being able to determine if a customer is legally old enough to buy alcohol.

“To further limit any element of doubt staff at the West Kirby store are required to ask anyone buying alcohol to confirm that they are over 21.”

Robert Spencer, of Jihad Watch, recently published an analysis of the latest Bin Laden video interpreting the invitation to convert to Islam and the dyed beard as possible signals of an imminent attack on the US.

Former CIA operative Robert Scheuer agrees.

Scheuer (told) NewsMax he was startled by reaction in the press that the recent bin Laden tape offered “no overt threat.”

In fact, Scheuer says, bin Laden made a “very overt threat.”

“He says basically our job will be to keep killing you and killing you faster if you don’t convert to Islam,” Scheuer recounted, adding, “If that’s not a threat I don’t know what is.” ...

Scheuer says he was truly shocked just days after the bin Laden tape was released when Frances Townsend, Bush’s homeland security adviser, appeared Sept. 9 on “Fox News Sunday” and CNN’s “Late Edition” and provocatively characterized bin Laden as “virtually impotent” and “on the run.”

“This is about the best he can do,” Townsend asserted. “This is a man on a run, from a cave, who’s virtually impotent other than these tapes.”

Scheuer noted the irony of Townsend’s claim, which came in the wake of bin Laden ridiculing President Bush about the Iraq war as he reminded the world that he has not been captured.

Scheuer also noted that Townsend’s comments fly in the face of recent reports by U.S. officials warning that bin Laden’s al-Qaida has been reenergized. A National Intelligence Estimate in mid-July said al-Qaida will likely leverage its contacts and capabilities in Iraq to mount an attack on U.S. soil. ...

Scheuer said calling bin Laden virtually impotent would in the Muslim world be interpreted as “saying that he’s not a man. It’s comes across as nothing so much as a challenge.”

“This is a challenge not only to the enemy but to the virility and it’s from a woman, which in Arab culture is even more denigrating,” he said.

Scheuer described Townsend as “ignorant” and “malevolent” for her comments.

“The other thing that made me shake my head was that this great superpower is responding to a man who we claim is running from rock to rock and cave and cave… We’re advising American families to have multiple evacuation plans in case we get attacked again. The Director of National Intelligence says al-Qaida is established in our country. And she’s saying al-Qaida is impotent! What the hell is she talking about?”

In an earlier NewsMax interview, Scheuer predicted there was going to be another major terrorist attack on the U.S. He says nothing from bin Laden’s latest appearance dissuades him from that assessment.

“[Bin Laden’s] been working fastidiously on [another attack] since 2001,” Scheuer concludes.

The former CIA unit chief says bin Laden made enemies among Muslims for his 9/11 attacks by failing to follow Islamic law and issue enough of a warning, seek converts, offer a truce and get the necessary religious fatwas authorizing the attack.

But today, Scheuer argues, bin Laden has done that. He concludes that his latest video – when analyzed with the previous statements of his second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, suggests another major attack could happen soon. Scheuer says he’s surprised that few in the West appear to be taking notice of what bin Laden and his surrogates are saying.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has reversed a district court decision, ruling against Yale Law School in Burt v. Rumsfeld thereby upholding the Solomon Amendment which denies certain federal funding to a college or university if any part of the college or university refuses military recruiters equal access to its students and campuses.

Scott Johnson notes the nobility of the University administration’s commitment to the interests of “the world at large.”

I happened to be at Yale in October 2003 when Navy Judge Advocate General recruiter Brian Whitaker was scheduled to meet with students interested in serving as Navy lawyers. Virtually all Yale law students had signed a petition vowing not to meet with Whitaker or other JAG recruiters. The petition was publicly posted inside the law school as part of a protest display that included black and camouflage wall hangings. The one law student scheduled to meet with Whitaker cancelled the interview.

The ostensible cause of the consternation occasioned by Whitaker’s visit was the military’s compliance with the federal “don’t ask/don’t tell” law on homosexual conduct in the armed forces. Law schools across the country had hindered military recruiters from meeting with law students because the military’s adherence to the “don’t ask/don’t tell” law violates nondiscrimination policies enforced by the schools against on-campus recruiters.

Whitaker’s putative right to visit Yale Law School despite its nondiscrimination policy was attributable solely to the Bush administration’s enforcement of the Solomon Amendment requiring federally-funded universities to open their doors to military recruiters or risk losing federal funds. After 9/11 the Defense Department began to threaten enforcement of the amendment, and law schools began to comply. At Yale, for example, the law school has waived its nondiscrimination policy in order to preserve the university’s annual $350 million in federal funding only since the fall of 2002. Then-law school Dean Anthony Kronman explained:

We would never put at risk the overwhelmingly large financial interests of the University in federal funding. We have a point of principle to defend, but we will not defend this—at the expense of programs vital to the University and the world at large.

Dean Kronman paid a backhanded tribute to the “money talks” impetus behind the Solomon Amendment. The Kronman Doctrine provides: For the good of the world, Yale must retain access to your money.

Yale Daily News

Atlanta Constitution reports Harris Poll results:

After officially declaring his candidacy, U.S. Senator Fred Thompson moves ahead of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani in the race for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. One-third (32%) of those who say they will vote in a Republican primary or caucus will vote for Thompson while 28 percent will vote for Giuliani. Much further back is John McCain, who continues his downward slide with 11 percent saying they would vote for the Arizona Senator, and 9 percent who say they would vote for former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney.

At Daily Kos, lurxst comes right out and says what a lot of us have known for a very long time.

This has been digging at me for, oh, about 4 years now. I have been hesitant to express this thought, in comments sections and in discussion with other people about the Iraq quagmire for fear of, I don’t know, being called mean. Or, un-American. Or something.

Supporting the troops essentially means supporting the illegal war. It seems that us anti-war types have been doing all sorts of mental and philisophical gymnastics to try and work around this. What has emerged is a sort of low impact, mealy-mouthed common wisdom that is palatable to everyone but is ultimately going to allow us to stay in Iraq for years to come.

He’s a traitor, sure, but at least he’s not a liar and a hypocrite.

The Zogby Poll finds George W. Bush is a trifle unpopular with a mere approval rating of 29%, but Congress is doing so much worse at 11% that one almost expects to see angry peasants with torches and pitchforks attacking the Capitol.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad probably has a higher public approval rating in the United States than the Reid/Pelosi Congress.

Patrick Lakey, Heidegger: Hut, Todtnauberg, Black Forest, Germany, I, 2005.

My old Philosophy professor, the late John N. Findlay, would bristle with patrician scorn at the very mention of Heidegger’s name, and would proceed to explain to students in a tone of wearied contempt that Heidegger was unworthy of serious attention, having promulgated a false philosophy which systematically confused human emotional states with metaphysical entities. Others would probably be more indignant over Heidegger’s purging of the University of Freiburg, his expressed ambition of providing the philosophic basis for the National Socialist Movement, and the continuing ability of Heideggerian thought post-WWII to inspire murderous totalitarians.

Harvard English professor, Leland de la Durantaye visits the famous hut on the mountain in the Black Forest in the spirit of a pilgrimage to a sort of shrine, and meditates on its former owner and his sinister and influential oeuvre.

In philosophy, as with the martial arts, a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. My little bit of knowledge about Heidegger’s philosophy told me that Heidegger’s final collection of essays bore the modest title Wegmarken. Wegmarken means “Path-Markers,” and was a simple enough title for a collection of essays. But when it came out, it reminded his readers of his most influential collection of essays and lectures published eighteen years earlier: Holzwege. Holzwege proved a disarmingly difficult title to translate, or even understand: Holz means “wood,” and wege means “paths.” Thus: “Paths in the Forest”—but Holzwege are not just any paths. They are paths made not for the forest but the trees; paths for finding and carrying wood (back to your hut), not for getting from point A to B. And when you are on one, you are, proverbially, on the wrong path. They are thus a special kind of Rundweg. And they can be dangerous if you do not recognize them for what they are, as sooner or later it gets dark and the animals come out. The French translated Heidegger’s book as “Paths That Lead Nowhere”; in a sign of Anglo-Saxon sobriety and pragmatism, the English translation is Basic Writings.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Fred Thompson on HillaryCare.

1:24 video

AP:

Snake collector Matt Wilkinson of Portland (Oregon) grabbed a 20-inch rattler (Crotalus viridis viridis) from the highway near Maupin, and three weeks later, to impress his ex-girlfriend, he stuck the serpent in his mouth.

He was soon near death with a swollen tongue that blocked his throat. Trauma doctors at the Oregon Health and Science University saved his life.

“You can assume alcohol was involved,” he said. Actually, not just beer. It was something he called a “mixture of stupid stuff.”

Calls from cable network television stations poured in Tuesday, when he still had sore muscles and nerves from the venom.

It happened at a barbecue with friends.

Wilkinson, 23, had downed a six-pack and his ex-girlfriend asked him for a beer. He handed her one, not realizing the snake was also in his hand.

“She said, ‘Get that thing out of my face,”’ Wilkinson said. “I told her it was a nice snake. ‘Nothing can happen. Watch.”’

So he stuck the snake in his mouth.

“It got a hold of my tongue,” he said.

He was having breathing problems when his ex-girlfriend drove him to the hospital. “She was the only one sober,” Wilkinson said.

2:11 video

Hat tip to Xavier.

Two University of Florida security officers were placed on leave awaiting the results of an investigation by the State of Florida into the appropriateness of police response to a long-winded student questioner of Massachusetts Senator John Kerry.

21-year-old Andrew Meyer monopolized the microphone for only a few minutes, subjecting Kerry to three rambling and paranoid questions, then was seized and forcibly carried away by University police before the senator had time to reply.

Young Meyer’s verbal protests and expressions of astonishment at being arrested provoked the five security officers to throw him to the ground at the rear of the auditorium and handcuff him. His continued pleas cries for help led them to administer electric shocks with a Taser.

Today’s new stories feature excerpts of a self-exculpating police report implicitly accusing Meyer of orchestrating his arrest as a publicity stunt and quoting him as saying afterwards: “I am not mad at you guys, you didn’t do anything wrong. You were just trying to do your job.”

It will probably be a short investigation.

Though Mr. Meyer was behaving inappropriately, taking a little excess questioning time and talking nonsense are neither criminal offenses, and there was no reason to suppose that he represented any actual threat to Senator Kerry or to the rest of the audience at all. Whoever was in charge of the meeting was perfectly entitled to ask Mr. Meyer to relinquish the microphone, but it was his forcible removal which caused the subsequent disruption and delay of the proceedings.

There was no obvious reason he should have been arrested. And, as the second video demonstrates, the university security personnel were embarrassed and confused themselves, telling Mr. Meyer with manifest insincerity to “calm down,” and absurdly threatening to charge him with “inciting a riot.”

While Andrew Meyer’s sufferings were in service to no cause beyond his own political delusions and mistaken sense of self-importance, it needs to be recognized that it was undoubtedly the University of Florida itself which filled that young man’s head with leftwing ideology and paranoia. And there is something beyond even that wrong in the atmosphere and consciousness of a university where security people behave like this.

Underneath all the pomp and symbolism, a university is, in the final analysis, a business and its students are its customers. A business whose employees go around tasering annoying customers has a problem with its service policies.

And a University is not only a business. Its relationship to students is also supposed to be a relationship of affection. It is going to ask them to donate money one fine day after they graduate. If you treat your students like some South American dictatorship treats its revolutionary opponents, you will not do very well raising funds for that new laboratory or football stadium.

Earlier posting

The Jerusalem Post reports:

Proof of cooperation between Iran and Syria in the proliferation and development of weapons of mass destruction was brought to light Monday in Jane’s Defence Weekly, which reported that dozens of Iranian engineers and 15 Syrian officers were killed in a July 23 accident in Syria.

According to the report, cited by Channel 10, the joint Syrian-Iranian team was attempting to mount a chemical warhead on a Scud missile when the explosion occurred, spreading lethal chemical agents, including sarin nerve gas. ...

Syria is not a signatory of either the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), – an international agreement banning the production, stockpiling or use of chemical weapons – or the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT).

AFP:

Iranian engineers were among those killed in a blast at a secret Syrian military installation two months ago, defence group Jane’s said Wednesday after claiming that the base was being used to develop chemical weapons.

The July 26 explosion in Aleppo, northern Syria, was reported at the time. The official Sana news agency said 15 Syrian military personnel were killed and 50 people were injured, most of them slightly from flying glass.

The agency said only that “very explosive products” blew up after fire broke out at the facility and that the blaze was not an act of sabotage.

But in the September 26 edition of Jane’s Defence Weekly, Syrian defence sources were quoted as saying the explosion happened during tests to weaponise a Scud C missile with mustard gas, which is banned under international law.

Fuel caught fire in a missile production laboratory and “dispersed chemical agents (including VX and Sarin nerve agents and mustard blister agent) across the storage facility and outside.

“Other Iranian engineers were seriously injured with chemical burns to exposed body parts not protected by safety overalls,” the publication quoted the sources as saying.

Among the dead were “dozens” of Iranian missile weaponisation engineers, it added.

The cover of the 7th edition of Politieke Geschiedenis van Belgie [Political History of Belgium] features an illustration of a merged Lion and Cock. This graphic representation of an animal with two aspects: the head, arms and a leg of the Flemish lion, and the tail, wing, and claw of the Walloon cock symbolizes the Federation of Belgium: a country divided by language.

100 days have gone by since the general election on June 10th and rival French and Flemish-speaking parties have remained unable to form a government.

The Economist has already editorialized in favor of dissolving the Belgian Federation. September 6th:

The prime minister designate thinks Belgians have nothing in common except “the king, the football team, some beers”, and he describes their country as an “accident of history”. In truth, it isn’t. When it was created in 1831, it served more than one purpose. It relieved its people of various discriminatory practices imposed on them by their Dutch rulers. And it suited Britain and France to have a new, neutral state rather than a source of instability that might, so soon after the Napoleonic wars, set off more turbulence in Europe.

The upshot was neither an unmitigated success nor an unmitigated failure. Belgium industrialised fast; grabbed a large part of Africa and ruled it particularly rapaciously; was itself invaded and occupied by Germany, not once but twice; and then cleverly secured the headquarters of what is now the European Union. Along the way it produced Magritte, Simenon, Tintin, the saxophone and a lot of chocolate. Also frites. No doubt more good things can come out of the swathe of territory once occupied by a tribe known to the Romans as the Belgae. For that, though, they do not need Belgium: they can emerge just as readily from two or three new mini-states, or perhaps from an enlarged France and Netherlands.

Brussels can devote itself to becoming the bureaucratic capital of Europe. It no longer enjoys the heady atmosphere of liberty that swirled outside its opera house in 1830, intoxicating the demonstrators whose protests set the Belgians on the road to independence. The air today is more fetid. With freedom now taken for granted, the old animosities are ill suppressed. Rancour is ever-present and the country has become a freak of nature, a state in which power is so devolved that government is an abhorred vacuum. In short, Belgium has served its purpose. A praline divorce is in order.

And AP reports that this week, someone tried to sell Belgium on Ebay:

Hidden among the porcelain fox hounds and Burberry tablecloths on sale at eBay.be this week was an unusual item: “For Sale: Belgium, a Kingdom in three parts … free premium: the king and his court (costs not included).”

The odd ad was posted by one disgruntled Belgian in protest at his country’s political crisis which reached a 100-day landmark Tuesday with no end in sight to the squabbling between Flemish and Walloon politicians.

“I wanted to attract attention,” said Gerrit Six, the teacher and former journalist who posted the ad. “You almost have to throw rock through a window to get attention for Belgium.”

Six placed the advertisement on Saturday, offering free delivery, but pointing out that the country was coming secondhand and that potential buyers would have to take on over $300 billion (euro220 billion) in national debt.

Like many of Belgium’s 10 million citizens, Six is exasperated that the power struggle between the county’s French- or Dutch-speaking political parties has left Belgium in political limbo since June 10 elections.

Demands for more autonomy from the Dutch-speaking Flemish are resisted by the French-speaking Walloons, making it impossible to form a government coalition and triggering concern the kingdom is on the verge of a breakup.

Six decided to vent his frustration through the Internet ad.

“My proposal was to make it clear that Belgium was valuable, it’s a masterpiece and we have to keep it,” he told Associated Press Television News. “It’s my country and I’m taking care of it, and with me are millions of Belgians.”

Daily Kos cites a poll of 1461 Iraqis taken by a “respected British marketing research firm” which proves the US is responsible for the violent deaths of more than a million Iraqis so far.

And Ray Drake, at Davids Medienkritik, cites German media reports of numbers of US anti-war demonstrators.

ARD Tagesschau, SZ and SPIEGEL ONLINE – “4,000 to 6,000” anti-war demonstrators
ZDF and Die Zeit – “About 10,000” anti-war demonstrators
TAZ – “Tens-of-thousands” of anti-war demonstrators
Die Welt – “50,000 anti-war demonstrators”
Die Presse (Austrian media site) – “Around 100,000 Americans marched against the war…”

Do I hear 200,000? 500,000? 1,000,000 anti-war demonstrators? Going once – going twice – sold!

Dangerous criminal in orange jumpsuit

A long-winded University of Florida student who was asking John Kerry a series of rambling questions had his microphone cut off, then was arrested by a group of uniformed University police.

Andrew Meyer, 21, asserted that Kerry had really won the 2004 election because of Republican suppression of minority votes and voting fraud. He asked why no efforts were underway to impeach Bush, and then proceeded to inquire whether Kerry had belonged to the same Senior Society as Bush at Yale. (The answer is: Yes, he did.)

An explicit reference to oral sex in relation to President Clinton’s impeachment evidently provoked the authorities to turn off the microphone. That level of monitoring seems unusual and excessive in a university context to me.

The same authorities evidently sic’ed their cops on him as well. Someone mildly disrupting an event in this way in many universities might very well be escorted from the room by local security. But, in this case, University of Florida cops responded to Meyer’s protests, questions, and pleas for assistance by throwing him to the ground, hand cuffing him, and administering incapacitating electrical shocks with a Taser as he pled for mercy.

John Kerry, meanwhile, made feeble and ineffective attempts to calm the situation, demonstrating just how decisive he would have been as president in a crisis. The police simply ignored Kerry, and went on brutalizing the screaming student. Throughout the incident, Kerry’s pompous throat-clearings proved inadequate either to stop the violence or to regain the center of audience attention.

AP story

The incident 3:33 video

Aftermath 4:02 video

Mr. Meyer was evidently charged with resisting arrest and disturbing the peace. Watch for Mr. Meyer’s lawsuits against the University for false arrest and application of excessive force. And be sure you don’t ask John Kerry any questions about Skull and Bones!