The Jury Were Right To Acquit The Palestine Action Defendants. Here’s Why

Jurors bravely set aside social conditioning, the natural instinct we all share to defer to authority, and expectations fomented by establishment media. Instead they considered the actual evidence

By Jonathan Cook

February 8, 2026

Source: Jonathan Cook Substack

Even before the trial began, the British government had done its utmost to prejudice the proceedings against six Palestine Action activists.

It declared that they belonged to a terrorist organisation and that they were engaged in a terrorist enterprise in breaking into an Israeli weapons factory in Filton, Bristol – one, British officials avoided mentioning, that makes drones used to kill children in Gaza.

In the months before the trial, the home secretary of the time, Yvette Cooper, explicitly said her decision to proscribe Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation was, in part, based on the events that had unfolded at the Filton factory. We were told the logic behind her decision – the first time a non-violent direct-action group has been proscribed in British history – would become clear through the trial.

In the midst of the proceedings, the police released a highly edited – and extremely prejudicial – video clip to present the defendants as bent on violence against the weapons factory’s security guards and police officers who later attended the scene.

Meanwhile, the judge overseeing the trial, Mr Justice Johnson, refused the admission of any testimony relating to the crimes committed by Elbit Systems. He also directed the jury to convict the Filton Six on the charge of criminal damage.

The British establishment wanted one outcome and one outcome only – and it did everything in its power to make sure it got its way.

Yet after eight days of clearly intense deliberation, the jury refused to convict the Filton Six of any of the charges against them.

They were all acquitted of the most serious charge, aggravated burglary, that could have seen them locked up for life. Three were acquitted of violent disorder, while the jury was unable to reach a decision on the other three. The jury was similarly split over the criminal damage charge, despite the extreme pressure put on them to convict by the judge.

Given the highly inflamed and politicised climate surrounding the trial, that decision required extraordinary bravery – a courage some of the jurors presumably found in the inspiring speech delivered by one of the defence barristers, Rajiv Menon. He reminded them of the 350-year-old right established in British law for juries to ignore judicial interference of the kind exercised by Mr Justice Johnson.

You can read part of that astonishing speech in the link here.

On possibly the most significant charge from the government’s point of view – of grievous bodily harm levelled against one defendant, Samuel Corner – the jury was again split. This related to a tussle with one of the sledgehammers that was being used to destroy the Israeli killer-drones. The incident led to a female police officer’s back being injured. More on that injury later.

The highly edited videos of the struggle released by the prosecution – a move that should have been held as contempt of court in a proper trial – were designed to prove the government’s case that Palestine Action is a violent organisation deserving of proscription.

(It seems it needs clarifying here for some observers that violence, in law, refers to attacks on people, not property. If Palestine Action only damages property – weapons being used to kill civilians in Gaza – that makes it a non-violent organisation and one that should never have been proscribed.)

It is important to set out why the jurors reached the decisions they did, given the widespread denunciations that have greeted their findings – not least from former home secretary Suella Braverman, now with Reform, and the current Conservative shadow home secretary, Chris Philp.

It is important to understand why the bar for conviction was never likely to be reached – and why the jury were right in refusing to convict.

The aggravated burglary charge required proving that the six defendants harboured an intention, as they broke into the factory, to use the sledgehammers they had brought with them not only to destroy the killer-drones but additionally to hurt the security guards. The prosecution was unable to provide such evidence because it did not exist. The jury, therefore, had no choice but to acquit.

In fact, it was incredible overreach to imagine that such a charge would ever stick. It was brought for one reason only: because it was critical to building the government’s case that Palestine Action is a terrorist organisation. In other words, it was an entirely politicised charge. The jury saw right through the legal chicanery.

The government’s fallback position was the violent disorder charge, which still suggested violent intent from the activists. The problem once again, however, was that the charge clearly did not fit the events the jury watched for themselves from the much longer video footage.

Violent disorder is a charge usually associated with football hooligans or groups of people who start pub brawls. It is meant to prosecute those who conspire to cause random acts of violence that innocent bystanders believe threaten their safety. However, the longer video footage – or rather the bits that Elbit Systems had not withheld or destroyed – showed that it was actually the security guards who initiated much of the violence.

In violent disorder, there is a defence: of self-defence. In three of the cases, the jury was sure that the defendants had been protecting themselves or their fellow activists from violence being directed at them from the security guards. That is why they acquitted. The video evidence, incomplete as it was, was presumably more ambiguous in the case of the other three, which is why the jury could not reach agreement.

On the least significant charge, criminal damage, the judge had made clear he expected a conviction – and he tried to rig the trial to get that conviction by stripping the defendants of the only defence that was available, of “lawful excuse”. The defendants’ argument was that, yes, they had caused criminal damage but it was justified in stopping a far graver crime, that of genocide.

Despite the huge pressure on them to submit to the judge’s demand, enough of the jury clearly thought that, in this case, criminal damage – in the form of smashing up killer drones – was a reasonable action. It is quite extraordinary that the hill politicians like Braverman and Philp, and sections of the British public, want to die on is defending Israel’s right to make killer-drones on British soil. Thank God, we had people with a moral core, not these ghouls, on the jury.

On the single charge of grievous bodily harm against Corner, the jury could again not reach a decision. He is still on remand, with the danger he will be retried on this charge and possibly others. It is, therefore, difficult to say much beyond the fact that, given the clamour to convict him from politicians, the media and Israel worshippers, there must have been pretty clear extenuating circumstances that led some of the jurors to believe a conviction would be unreasonable.

Unlike much of the public, who have been inflamed by the official story that a “police woman’s back was broken”, the jury heard the actual medical diagnosis. In his closing speech, Corner’s defence barrister set out the facts:

The doctors looking at the first X-rays didn’t identify any bone damage, nor in an MRI later. The injury didn’t require surgery and Sergeant Evans was advised to take painkillers and do physiotherapy. The agreed facts state from medical evidence that you’d expect such a fracture to heal in six to twelve weeks, with full healing in three to six months, and no long-term consequences.

Keir Starmer’s government – a government actively complicit in Israel’s genocide – has every incentive to keep the Palestine Action trials going. It much prefers a public conversation about whether opponents of genocide are violent criminals and terrorists than one about whether British government ministers should be in the dock at the Hague for complicity in crimes against humanity.

It is likely the government will seek at least some retrials in this case and try to secure convictions against other Palestine Action activists whose trials are still pending. It will hope that, sooner or later, it gets the victory it needs to retrospectively justify its proscription and silencing of Palestine Action.

From the government’s point of view, it is a win-win. If it can get a compliant enough jury to win one of these trials, it will say it was right all along to declare Palestine Action a terrorist organisation. If it doesn’t secure any convictions, it will argue that these failed trials prove that juries need abolishing – an agenda it is already pursuing precisely to stop juries acquitting people the government wants convicted for political reasons.

Sadly, too many onlookers are falling for this legal charade, denouncing the jury’s decision in the Filton Six trial as if they know more about what happened at the weapons factory that night than the jurors who sat through 10 weeks of evidence and spent eight days deliberating on that evidence.

That is a strange, unhealthy kind of self-regard – and too many people are currently engaged in it.

A final point. Yes, juries can make mistakes. But that is highly unlikely to have been a problem in this trial.

Miscarriages of justice typically occur when the jury’s own socially conditioned biases, bolstered by judicial and political pressures, take priority over the evidence, or when the evidence is rigged to secure a conviction.

They happen in trials like the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four in the 1970s, when a series of men were wrongly jailed for IRA-related bombings in UK cities simply because they were Irish. In these cases, the juries assumed that the police had not fabricated evidence and had not coerced confessions through torture. They were wrong. The legal system was more interested in securing a conviction than justice.

The biases we hold as self-evident truths are always socially constructed – and the people who get to construct them are the political and media establishments that dominate the flow of information we receive from cradle to grave.

Those same political and media establishments exert most pressure when they see their own class interests under threat.

In short, the pressures on the jury in this case were in one direction only: to convict the Filton Six.

Transcripts show the judge – the trial’s highest authority figure – barely hiding his own biases in favour of conviction.

In refusing to convict, the jury had to set aside its social conditioning, the natural instinct we all share to defer to authority, and the wider social expectations fomented by the establishment media.

The route of least resistance – the one most people take – would have been to have found all, or at least some, of the Filton Six guilty – not least Corner, who had been turned into a hate figure by the media. It is a sign of how strongly the evidence pointed in a different direction that the jury still refused to do as it was told.Email

Jonathan Cook

Jonathan Cook is a British independent journalist, who has covered issues of Palestine and Israel for much of his over 20-year career. He formerly wrote for the Guardian and Observer newspapers and is a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism.

 

Syria’s Anti-Kurdish Offensive Suits Israeli Strategy

By Matt Broomfield

February 8, 2026

On January 6, Israeli and Syrian leaders met in Paris for US-sponsored talks which saw Syria’s Islamist president Ahmed al-Sharaa reach a tentative agreement aimed at a lasting security accord with Tel Aviv. That same day, the first shots were fired in a blitzkrieg offensive that has seen al-Sharaa’s forces seize 80 percent of the territory formerly held by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). The move has brought war to the gates of the Kurdish regions known as Rojava, and forced the SDF to accept an unfavorable ceasefire and integration agreement.

These two reversals are closely related, Syrian Kurdish political leaders say. Especially since former al-Qaeda affiliate al-Sharaa seized power from Bashar al-Assad in December 2024, Israeli politicians have paid lip service to the plight of two million Kurds now besieged in isolated towns. Meanwhile, certain Syrian Kurdish leaders started to view Israeli opposition to al-Sharaa as a potential counterweight to the Syrian president’s designs on Rojava, issuing Hail Mary appeals to Tel Aviv for support.

But on a geostrategic level, Israel appears cautiously content with al-Sharaa, who is moving toward normalizing the Israeli occupation in his country’s south while positioning himself as a key player in the United States’ anti-Iranian coalition. The new Sunni strongman in Damascus has offered Israel and the West an irresistible combination of acquiescent foreign policy and tight control of domestic politics, leaving the Kurds out in the cold once more.

The Paris Plan

“I’m not saying Israel is working together with al-Sharaa, but what is happening is the result of the understanding reached in Paris between Israel and al-Sharaa, and the victims here are the Kurds,” Syrian Kurdish diplomatic representative Abdulkarim Omar tells Jacobin. “The US was in attendance, as well as [Turkish foreign affairs minister and former intelligence chief] Hakan Fidan . . . They devised a plan to begin attacking Rojava.”

Diplomatic sources repeated similar claims to Reuters, describing a critical meeting last month in which US and Israeli officials both greenlit al-Sharaa’s offensive, which saw government forces rapidly gain control of large Arab hinterlands, including former ISIS capital Raqqa, amid massive Arab defections from the formerly multiethnic SDF.

Omar speaks in Qamişlo, capital of the de facto autonomous region that the Kurdish movement has governed for the past fourteen years on the basis of a nominally feminist, direct-democratic politics inspired and directed by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Government forces have besieged key Kurdish city Kobanê, cutting off medicine and food supplies, while drone strikes and advances by government-allied tribal forces threaten to sever Qamişlo from the sole border crossing linking Rojava to the outside world.

Damascus has deployed Turkmen and Islamist militiamen with long-term anti-Kurdish vendettas, including commanders sanctioned for war crimes against the Kurds. It is also benefiting from Turkish intelligence and technology as it executes Ankara’s long-term goal of liquidating the Kurdish-led autonomous region. Simultaneously, al-Sharaa is effectively using Hasbara-style tactics to discredit the Rojava project as a mere exercise in separatist terrorism. As observers have noted, the Syrian Arab Army produced maps identifying Kurdish-populated districts of Aleppo as terrorist-occupied open-fire zones, while government-affiliated media activists mock the tunnel networks painstakingly dug out by the SDF to shelter them from a years-long campaign of Turkish airstrikes as proof that cowardly Kurdish “terrorists” are sheltering below hospitals in dense urban environments.

“We Have to Protect Ourselves”

Public posturing in support of the Kurds’ secular project by Washington and Tel Aviv, not to mention Moscow, has never translated into material support in the face of Turkey’s prior anti-Kurdish offensives in Syria. This also meant that these latest reversals were met with resignation on the Kurdish street.

When I visited Rojava shortly after Assad’s dramatic 2024 ouster, local civilians and frontline fighters not infrequently expressed unlikely hopes of direct Israeli military support for the Kurdish-led administration, which immediately faced attacks from Turkish-backed militias now directed by al-Sharaa. “The Kurds are like children who grew up without parents, leaving them desperate for love from anyone,” a local journalist told me at the time.

A year on, the mood has shifted. While the United States had long maintained a “tactical, temporary, and transitional” presence in Syrian Kurdish territories on the basis of the US-Kurdish collaboration against ISIS, Donald Trump–appointed envoy to Syria Tom Barrack has made it clear that Washington’s interests now lie with Damascus.

Speaking in the streets of Qamişlo with an AK–47 in his hands, senior Syrian Kurdish politician Gharib Hesso repeats sentiments held by thousands of ordinary Kurds now taking up arms throughout Rojava: “Due to the silence of the international community, we have to protect ourselves,” he says. “The [Syrian] government reaches shady deals under their own initiative: we don’t get to see them, and we don’t accept them.” Soldiers on the front line openly express hopes that the ceasefire and integration deal will collapse as the United States departs, giving them the opportunity to fight mano a mano with forces they view as indistinguishable from the al-Nusra Front militants they first drove out of Kurdish territories in 2013 — prior to any collaboration with the United States.

Ethnic Polarization

Last-ditch appeals to Tel Aviv have naturally disappointed the Kurds’ supporters in the feminist and internationalist left, including international volunteers still on the ground in Rojava. More seriously, they contribute to the ongoing polarization of Syrian politics along ethnic grounds.

Especially following Syrian government massacres which killed over a thousand members each of the Alawite and Druze minorities in 2025 — the latter only halted by direct Israeli intervention — Kurds fear ethnic retribution by Islamist forces ideologically indistinct from the Kurds’ long-term nemesis in the Islamic State. Conversely, overtures to Tel Aviv have only intensified Arab perceptions of the Kurds as Western proxies, fighting for an identitarian cause with no place in a Sunni Arab–majority Syria.

Ugly scenes of government fighters desecrating cemeteries in fact belonging to Kurdish-allied Arab fighters or toppling the statue of an Arab female fighter in the anti-ISIS war, show the depth of this bitter polarization. In Qamişlo, corresponding anti-Arab sentiment runs high, as armed Kurdish youth spend sleepless nights on patrol on the lookout for Arab fifth columnists collaborating with Damascus — inevitably described as “ISIS sleeper cells,” in language picked up from the Kurds’ long-term US partners.

In reality, there was always a deep tension between the Kurds’ stated vision of a multiethnic, federal “brotherhood of peoples” and the reality of their military control over large, restive Arab populations. Though the SDF long offered the most palatable package of basic security and humanitarian provision in Syria’s complex map of control, Arabs nonetheless chafed under heavy-handed security measures and a political project generally viewed as a smoke screen for furthering Kurdish interests.

With Assad’s 2024 defeat, the Kurdish project was no longer the only show in town. The massive Arab defections that accompanied the SDF’s 2026 collapse were thus occasioned by a mix of legitimate Arab grievances, tribal opportunism as al-Sharaa’s rule consolidated, and simple desire to live in a unitary, internationally recognized state. In this context, Israel’s cultivated self-image as a friend to non-Arab minorities has only exposed the Kurds to retributive violence.

Double-Faced Policy

Whether by force of arms or at the negotiating table, those majority-Arab areas were always likely to revert to government control. But it is now the fate of Rojava’s Kurdish heartlands that hangs in the balance — a fate likely to be decided by ongoing shifts in US and Israeli policy, as the region gears up for Washington’s mooted operation against Iran.

An eleventh-hour ceasefire agreement has been reached between Damascus and Qamişlo, with Kurdish divisions expected to integrate into the Syrian army while retaining a limited degree of military and political integrity. But most locals place no more stock in this ceasefire than three recent agreements successively violated by al-Sharaa’s forces as they surged across the Euphrates, treating it with the same derision they now apply to the “brotherhood of peoples” slogan.

Rather, the expectation is the United States will likely stick around for only as long as it takes for their forces to complete a last-minute extradition program, flying thousands of ISIS detainees long held by the Kurds to neighboring Iraq.

These urgent deportations expose a contradiction at the heart of US policy in Syria. If the United States believes al-Sharaa is “willing and positioned” to take over anti-ISIS operations, why is it frantically flying out ISIS members the moment their camps and detention centers risk capture by al-Sharaa’s forces?

This contradiction is deep-rooted in the US security establishment. Whereas the Pentagon followed up on its prior experiences in Iraq to partner with the secular Kurds as part of its war on terror, the CIA backed “moderate Islamists” against Assad in line with its long-term policy against communist states.

The Pentagon’s Central Command currently appears to be slowing down the ISIS deportation program to throw a final bone to their Kurdish partners, but with US escalation against Iran looming, the anti-Iranian tendency is winning out. US policy is aligning behind al-Sharaa, with the White House backing the CIA’s position through its Trump-appointed, pro-Turkish Syria envoy Tom Barrack. The United States appears reassured that the new Sunni strongman in Damascus can secure their interests against the Shia militias now massing along the Syrian-Iraqi border, obviating the key factor that ultimately motivated the United States’ long-term presence in Syria’s Kurdish regions.

Anything for Power

Al-Sharaa is benefiting from these global dynamics to exert total domestic control. “Al-Sharaa is reaching agreements with everyone in order to remain in power,” Kurdish official Omar says. “With Russia, Israel, Turkey, the Gulf states, joining the International Coalition [against ISIS] . . . Anything it takes to remain in power.”

Alongside the ongoing US withdrawal, Russia has also pulled out of its own long-term base in Qamişlo, in a bid to preserve its more strategic military presence on Syria’s Mediterranean coast. Al-Sharaa has warmly returned the favor, flying to Moscow to break bread with Vladimir Putin even though the Russian Air Force had long pounded his forces with air strikes as part of a years-long campaign to keep Assad in power.

Likewise, al-Sharaa is proving himself able to deal with both Israel and Turkey, the two competing regional powers dominant in his new Syria. It would be an exaggeration to say that Damascus and Tel Aviv have put their long-term differences to rest. Israel continues to launch air strikes, conduct land operations, and oppose Turkish expansion elsewhere in Syria even as it ignores the conflict in Kurdish regions, while Damascus is cautious about normalizing relations with Israel given al-Sharaa’s militant Islamist base of support. Nonetheless, Tel Aviv appears cautiously content with the status quo in Syria, as it focuses its attention on Iran and its proxy militias in Iraq.

Turkey and Israel have their differences in Syria, but the two powers will be crucial US allies in any assault on Iran, and each is finding a functional interlocutor in al-Sharaa. The new president is willing to licence both Turkey’s long-term goal of liquidating Kurdish autonomy in the north, and Israel’s de facto occupation in the south. It may even suit Israel’s interests if Turkey is allowed to deepen its already profound security relationship with al-Sharaa, since these realities justify Israel’s own occupation.

The Gaza-ization of Kurdistan

PKK founder Abdullah Öcalan, who will soon enter his fourth decade of captivity in Turkey, has recently been allowed to speak out by his Turkish captors as part of an ongoing peace process in part intended to stymie Israel’s designs on Syria by drawing the SDF toward an accord with Ankara. In published minutes of these discussions, the PKK leader references his historic anti-Zionist position and describes himself as the only person able to prevent the SDF from falling under Israeli dominance. He instead calls for a modus vivendi with Turkey as he warns: “Israel has been at this for thirty years. For three decades, Israel has been secretly promising us a state.” Öcalan goes on to predict the “Gaza-ization” of Kurdish territories across Syria and Iraq as Israel attacks and partitions those countries.

Yet Gaza-ization can occur under both Israeli and Turkish dominance. Even if the latest Kurdish-Damascus ceasefire deal holds, the map of northern Syria proposed under this deal and already implemented in Turkish-occupied zones of the north of the country will closely resemble the occupied West Bank. Kurds and their political leaders are being hemmed into isolated enclaves set to be patrolled by ethnically Kurdish but centrally controlled security forces and systematically denied access to the resources, border crossings, and international political access they need to preserve any meaningful autonomy.

Syria’s Kurds might condemn their former Western backers, and look to their own weapons for protection. But they seem unlikely to be able to withstand Syria’s new Western-backed order for long.

 

Policing A Free Society

The People of America and Our Police–Law Enforcement in A Free Society: The Unitary Executive and the Lawfulness of ICE’s Use of Deadly Force

By William John Cox

February 8, 2026

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Line of federal agents in Minneapolis, Jan. 24, 2026, following the killing of Alex Pretti. (Chad Davis, Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0)

The year was 1972, President Nixon was running for reelection; violent crime was  rampant, as poorly trained police officers were outgunned by gangs in the war on  drugs, and law enforcement was often infected and obstructed by political corruption.  The People were scared, and young Americans were openly rebelling against being  sent off to die or be maimed in Viet Nam. With bombings of federal buildings in  Washington DC, and riots in the cities, the presidential policy question was, what to  do? Nixon appointed the commissioners of a National Advisory Commission on  Criminal Justice Standards and Goals, and professional members of task forces on the  Police, Courts, Corrections, and Community Crime Prevention, with each task force  staffed by research writers recruited from leading agencies to produce individual  reports, leading to the Commission’s Report. 

The opening question was whether Congress should enact more federal criminal  laws and fund their enforcement by more federal officers, backed up by the military?  It was unanimous that criminal laws should be primarily enacted by the States, and  that laws should be enforced at the most local level possible, to best ensure that the  Constitutional rights of everyone are preserved, and that the reserved individual  Rights of Liberty are respected. 

To implement national justice policy in the second term, a priority of new federal  fundings would be granted to local and state jurisdictions to identify and replicate best  practices, and to professionalize the administration of justice at every level. Acting  through the Justice Department’s Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, a  newly created Office of National Priority Programs would administer a billion-dollar  budget. National policing standards were quickly implemented by the creation of  Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) Commissions by the legislatures of  every state. Today, these State commissions certify the basic training and standards of all professional local and state sworn peace officers with arrest powers, and the  intermediate and advanced certifications of supervisors and commanders. The Commission adopted the following national standard for policing, which has  never been withdrawn or replaced as a matter of national criminal justice policy:¹ “The police in the United States are not separate from the people. They draw  their authority from the will and consent of the people, and they recruit their  officers from them. The police are the instrument of the people to achieve  and maintain order; their efforts are founded on principles of public service  and ultimate responsibility to the public.” 

“If the overall purposes of the police service in America were narrowed to a  single objective, that objective would be to preserve the peace in a manner  consistent with the freedoms secured by the Constitution.” 

Also adopted as a national standard was the Law Enforcement Code of Ethics, to  which every professional Peace Officer in America swears an oath when basically  trained and upon receiving their weapons and badge of arrest authority, which opens: 

“My fundamental duty is to serve; to safeguard lives and property; to protect  the innocent against deception, the weak against oppression or intimidation,  and the peaceful against violence or disorder; and to respect the Constitutional rights of all to liberty, equality and justice.” 

Reflecting upon the intervening 50 years of criminal justice practice and history,  one wonders if the Commissioners and their professional staffers who created these  enduring standards of national criminal justice policy, could ever have imagined the  social, political, and historical reality confronting the American People in the June  2026 elections. 

The vote of the American People this year will be an expression of our consent to  be governed by the failed and corrupt two-party system of government, and the  election will be the ultimate test of the wisdom of self-governing People, who chose  to police themselves as an expression of their reserved Rights of Liberty.

A fundamental question addressed by the Commission and its task forces was the  nature and control of the raw physical power of restraint, arrest, and the lawful  application of violent lethal force in the free society of America; whether police  authorities can control crime and riots, while allowing and protecting constitutional  dissent; can we the People peacefully coexist in our nation of laws, with enforcement  actions authorized by Law, bound by our Constitution, and guided by locally defined  policies governing discretion in all matters of personal liberty? 

Or, 

Are to become a nation of Man, where all military, justice, and policing power is  concentrated in one Man, the elected president, whose absolute discretion and  Executive Orders prevail over law and Constitution. The “unitary executive” of the  federal government and Commander in Chief is not bound by the Constitution, or his  oath to “preserve, protect, and defend” it, or by the laws of Congress and the States,  or by the orders of any Court. 

With the best of foresight, could the Commissioners in the era of Nixon’s voluntary resignation,  have imagined a president admittedly constrained only by his “own morality,” a president, who when  inaugurated the second time was on bail pending sentencing for multiple felony convictions for paying  hush money to a porn star during his first campaign, a president whose indictment for inciting the  January 6, 2021 “OneSix” insurrection against Congress was imminent; a president who was  granted immunity from prosecution by a majority of the Court he appointed, while at the same time  disobeying judicial orders he is Constitutionally obligated to enforce as the nation’s chief law  enforcement officer. 

Could the anyone imagine a president who refused to accept electoral defeat following his first  term, and who hired and incited a riotous mob to attack Congress to stop the Electoral College count,  who refused to attend the inauguration of his lawfully elected successor, and whose last order as  Commander in Chief was his own 21-gun salute. 

A president whose first act in his second term was to pardon more than 300 convicted felons who  had swarmed the Capitol at his instruction, irrespective of the seriousness of their crimes, including  deadly attacks on police officers. A president who appointed his own personal defense attorney as his  loyal constitutional Attorney General controlling the Justice Department, secured the dismissal of his  own impending indictment, and obtained immunity from prosecution for all acts as president; a  president who has ordered the prosecution of his political and personal enemies, focusing his expressed hatred on “all Democrats;” a president who denies disaster aid to Blue States, and deploys uninvited  and untrained paramilitary gangs into their cities to round up immigrant visiting workers, while there  are far greater numbers of undocumented immigrants in large Red State cities. 

Could the Commissioners in 1972 imagine that a president would refuse to surrender control of  his branded family business enterprises while in office, including issuing his own presidential crypto  memecoins, netting millions–with a reciprocal loss to investors; that a president would continue to  gamble in the stock market with the buying and selling of securities and bonds, profiting from inside  knowledge of his own Executive Orders; or that a president would openly solicit and accept lavish  gifts, including objects of gold from all seekers of favors, directly or through the inflated purchase price  of his commercial products. 

A president whose image appears not only on his memecoins and soon to be on a commemorative  dollar, but displayed on massive banners hung on federal buildings around the District of Columbia,  with some locations already renamed with his brand; a president who demolished one historic wing of  the White House to build a grand ballroom paid for by his wealthy supporters, and who ordered the  simple residence built by the People for their president, and his oval office to be gilded with the gold  leaf of royalty. 

A fantasy president who acted as the unitary executive, with today’s vast powers of Commander  in Chief of the combined military, homeland security, justice, and intelligence resources; who in their  wildest dreams 50 years ago could have imagined such a president renouncing defense alliances that  are the constitutional Supreme Law of the Land, reversing a military philosophy of united defense to  become an aggressive, ultra masculine Department of War, who appointed a former soldier journalist,  television influencer, tattooed nationalist as his loyalist Secretary; fired the inspector generals and  general counsels of the War Department and other vital departments, fired all women and officers of  color in command positions; a president who staged a military parade for his birthday; a president  who acts without any application for a declaration, or even notice to Congress, before bombing the  nuclear generating facilities of a nation that we are not at war with, and who does not pose a present  threat to the American People; a president who militarily blockaded and violently invaded the capital  of another country, killing dozens to kidnap its leader and his wife, all expressly to secure the  country’s oil resources; a president who does all this, committing crimes in violation of internation law,  and then extorts the Nobel Peace Prize from its legitimate recipient, as that nation’s lawfully elected  resistance leader, while making side deals with the successors of the old regime.

Acting entirely without Congressional acts or approval, imagine a president who has threatened,  imposed, and withdrawn import tariffs at whim, which are acts of economic warfare, on all nations  including allies and adversaries. The economic cost of which have been imposed as an unlegislated tax  on the People by the president, rather than Congress, while ending the People’s health care subsidy to  reduce taxes on the corporations and wealthy CEOs, including himself. 

A president who as the chief law enforcement officer deployed thousands of untrained and  unrestrained paramilitary agents to brutally enforce immigration deportation laws, treating all  immigrants as though they are all violent felons, and all constitutional protestors as urban terrorists,  and who has unlawfully deployed military units within the States in defiant violation of the Posse  Comitatus Act. 

Back then, could we believe that a president, who spent years selling millions in development  properties to Russian oligarchs, cleaning their money into the U.S. banking system, would risk  conducting personal private talks with the president of that adversary nation during his first term in  Helsinki and more recently in Anchorage, and frequently on the telephone, without American  translators or note takers; one would wonder why only that nation would be spared tariffs, and which  continues to invade and occupy another nation, despite the Budapest agreement of the United States  and Russia in 1994 to protect and defend Ukraine if it surrendered its nuclear weapons to Russia. 

Who could have believed that a president in his second term would sue his own Department of  Internal Revenue and Treasury Department demanding $10 billion in damages because of leaks  made during his first term when they were under his supervision, that truthfully revealed the president  only paid $750 in taxes in 2016, and no taxes in ten of the previous 15 years. 

Finally, could the Commissioners have foreseen a president who began to expressly govern as a  dictator from “day one,” one who is unwilling to surrender the Constitutional powers of office a second  time, and who has threatened to suspend elections, if he perceives an insurrection against his personal  power? A president who is the most powerful person on Earth, who not only has nuclear weapons  under his personal launch command, but also the regular military commanded through his  Department of War, 70,000 special forces directed by his National Security Council, plus his new  personal paramilitary ICE army. All of this raw power is controlled by the physical brain and body  of an angry, raging, glaring, forgetful, vengeful, threatening old man, however, inside there’s a lazy,  spoiled boy, uncaring, unable to read, sly, fearful, afraid of his rich bullying father, who gave him  almost billion dollars to invest, who became a serial failure and bankrupt until being bailed out as a  reality television star, who marketed his own brand. Throughout he succeeded by bullying and threatening with his lawyers to get what he wanted, and what he couldn’t earn on his own merit.  Now, what he demands is the oil of Venezuela, the mineral resources of Greenland, a nation  protected by NATO, and the destruction of Iran at the instruction of Israel, whose intelligence  apparatus knows all the president’ Epstein and Russian secrets. Irrespective of the pathology, his  threats and application of military violence were declared to be war crimes following World War II,  based on the lessons learned from appeasing the threats and insatiable demands of dictators. 

The wisdom of the Commission’s recommendations 50 years ago, and their  adoption by the Nixon (and Ford) administrations, and every successor presidency  until now, can be found all across the United States in every county, town, city, and  

state, where uniform POST standards funded by a slight penalty assessment (p.a.) on  all court fines have trained generations of professional peace officers to act according  to the Constitution, Law, and national and state professional standards, and to be  guided in their discretion by locally formulated policy and systems of accountability. 

In addition to the police service, standards have been established throughout the  justice systems in the Courts, Corrections, and Community Crime Prevention. With  self-funding through penalty assessments, and by serving as professional standards for  federal and private grants and funding, the vision of local policing, judgement, and  corrections by the People themselves has substantially reduced violent crime by half  and property crimes by one third in America in the past 50 years. 

Widely emulated by other nations, standard-based professional policing has  allowed the American People to safely travel across its States and around the world in  a rules-based international order of justice, using our mobile phones to get us where  we are going, with the means to pay our way, and to feel safe in seeking police  protection if threatened.

Are these violent acts of ICE agents lawful?

Brutal violent takedown  arrests by gangs of masked, unidentified ICE agents; forced, warrantless entrances  into residences; the casual use of dangerous riot control agents including CS gas,  Tasers, bean bag firearms, threats with military assault weapons and unholstered  sidearms by unsupervised ICE agents and military personnel, acting under orders of  Homeland Security and the War Department primarily against misdemeanor-level  immigration deportations and constitutional protestors.

Agents have been involved in more than 30 shootings in the last year, becoming  increasingly deadly with two shooting deaths in one week of American citizen  protestors in Minneapolis during the “Operation Metro Surge” by ICE and other  federal agents. Both January shootings are clearly out of police policy standards and  are probably criminal homicide in one degree or another; the widespread applications  of riot control violent methods are not preceded by the mandatory declarations of  unlawful assembly, or according to other basic justice and constitutional standards,  before the application of violence against peaceful constitutional protestors. 

The answer to the title question is clearly no, as these practices do not even come  close to the standard of justice Americans have come to expect as a constitutional  right, but the invasion and brutality offend our reserved Rights of Liberty to be left  alone by our own government. We originally organized ourselves together as patriots  to revolt against the king and our colonies’ corporate owners, and we fought in World  War II against corporate fascism and dictatorial rule to keep government of every  form out of our lives, homes, and communities to the greatest extent possible. 

Freed from the threats and coercion of federal paramilitary agencies such as ICE,  we the People can best take care of most policing matters on the local level, including  the threat posed by our law abiding, tax paying, undocumented visitor workers, and we  can elect our own representatives to represent us in governing our democratic  republic, which is empowered by our consent, according to our policies. 

The federal agents and soldiers employing violence toward immigrants, targeting  citizens of color and protestors, are acting under the command of constitutional  officers who are personally accountable and individually loyal to the president, instead  of the Constitution. The ICE agents are acting under the authority of Executive  Orders, instead of Congressional law and the Constitution. The agent’s use of force  and discretion is guided by the president’s racist policies as expressed on social media  describing lawful immigrants and citizens as “garbage,” the undocumented as  “animals” and “monsters,” and constitutional protesters as domestic terrorists,  accompanied by hints of immunity and pardons for the unlawful acts of his loyalists. 

Acting without authorization as the unitary executive in defiance of Congress, the  executive orders of Trump resulted in a swarm of intentional violations of existing  laws that overwhelmed the judicial system, as planned by Project 2025. The legal conclusion is compelling that there is no legal justification for any ICE arrest actions, and that  the violence imposed by federal agents is clearly in violation of the Constitution they are sworn to  protect and defend. 

The excessive physical violence and use of force imposed by these poorly trained  and unsupervised ICE agents is far disproportional to the threat, and the arrests fail to  meet the most basic national professional standards of constitutional law  enforcement, much less the performance of highly trained police SWAT units. Such  violent military tactics are not only substandard and unlawful, but they are also null  and void, ab initio, as lacking any valid authority. They are probably violations of State  laws, and individual agents and their commanders may be subject to state prosecution,  and convictions cannot be pardoned by the president. 

Recruited with minimal background investigations and paid tens of thousands of  dollars in upfront signing and arrest bonuses, provided training far short of basic  POST standards, ICE agents are so poorly trained that they cannot control an  unarmed arrestee on their own, even with a partner, without violently attacking  individuals and spraying chemical agents in their faces. 

POST trained police officers know that you cannot transform a vehicle into a  weapon by stepping in front of it, nor can you kill a car by shooting at it, but every  trained officer knows that a car with a dead driver can strike other cars and children.  Professionals also know that once a person is disarmed and no longer a threat, they  cannot be shot nine times. Trained officers expect that following every use of deadly  force, there will be an objective, lessons-learned, after-action evaluation that identifies  mistakes made so they are not repeated. Professional officers have learned from  professional experience that errors can never be covered up for very long, as they  always come back to haunt you, until corrected. 

Particularly troublesome in the exercise of the paramilitary arrest violence by ICE,  other federal agents, and military personnel is the absence of clear rules of  engagement for applying military grade lethal force, and command accountability.  Even worse are the implied immunity and pardon that are being suggested by  commanders and constitutional officers, who quickly go on social media to absolve  the shooters and to criminally charge their victims, before any investigation.  Deploying military doctrine to bring the maximum force and to kill, rather than the police doctrine to use the minimum amount of force required to secure detention, the  ICE rules of engagement appear to be the same as occupied Iraq, “shoot and scoot.” There is little difference in the deployment of poorly trained and commanded,  brown combat clad, masked, paramilitary ICE agents being deployed against the  People of America, including their peaceful, hardworking, tax paying, undocumented  immigrant visitors, and the Nazi Brownshirt SA being used to intimidate and round  up hardworking Jews, both being scapegoats to the accumulation, corruption, and  abuse of power.

Can this abomination of American Justice and the constitutional  betrayal of the American People be reversed before it becomes  entrenched and hereditary? Success will require every liberty-loving American,  whether Republican, Democrat, Independent, Libertarian, Green, ANTIFA, or  MAGA to put aside our political differences and to agree that we do not consent to  be governed by deceit and corruption, and that irrespective of the candidates presently  offered or elected, the existing two-party system of government no longer represents  the interests of the People, instead of the corporations and wealthy elite who have  corrupted it. 

We the People, acting together, have the power to generate the collective  “wisdom of the crowd;” thinking and working together, we will always be smarter and  better than any one individual, no matter how rich, famous, influential, or charismatic  they may be. If we are intelligent enough to pay taxes and to die in wars, we are smart  enough to make our own policy choices every four years before the presidential  election in a national policy referendum, when we all vote on the 12 most critical  issues facing the new administration. Then, we will cast our informed votes for the  representatives who promise to implement our policy choices. 

The Voter’s Bill of Rights addresses the most important issues about voting,  expands our constitutional rights, resulting in more effective self-governance and  respect for our reserved Rights of Liberty. 

Before the primary elections in June and the general election in November, it is  essential that every candidate for every public office in the United States be  respectfully and repeatedly asked, “Do you support the Voter’s Bill of Rights of the  American People? 

As the Rights of Liberty of all American People are surely threatened by the  current corporate-AI puppeteer takeover of our government under the guise of  MAGA, playing one party against the other, and by the insatiable greed of its gilded  unitary executive and his creditors and sycophants, never forget, one of the great  powers retained by the American People is our right of liberty to quietly suspend our  personal consent to be governed by deceit and corruption, irrespective of party or  personage. A government in which representatives are loyal to the People and their  laws and Constitution, rather to political party, powerful corporations, and wealthy contributors, one in which we retain and defend our liberty to create our own policies  and to police ourselves. 

A new Congress next January could impeach and convict not only the President,  but all the constitutional officer who are aiding and abetting his many crimes, without  having to wait two more years of his immunized crime spree and his pardoning of  coconspirators to see what he and his vice president are going to do.

A Populist, Pro-Labor Progressive Scores Huge Upset Win in Deep Red Republican Texas District

Republicans in Texas are sweating over a democrat win in a district that voted overwhelmingly for Trump

By Ken Bank

February 9, 2026

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

CC0 1.0 Universal public domain image via Rawpixel

While Donald Trump’s approval ratings have taken a nosedive in the last few months Republican leadership, especially in the solidly red state of Texas, are seriously sweating over the result of a special election on January 31 for the state senate in a district that voted overwhelmingly for Trump and has not elected a Democrat for several decades.

Even more surprising, and upsetting to Republicans, is that Democratic candidate Taylor Rehmet defeated his much better-funded Republican opponent, who ran with a personal endorsement from Trump, by almost the same margin that Trump received in the 2024 election.

Rehmet’s victory added to the Democrats’ record of overperforming in special elections so far this cycle, beginning in March — when they prevailed in a Pennsylvania legislative district made up of suburbanites and farmers that Democrats hadn’t held in a century — and continuing through to November, when they dominated candidate and ballot contests from Maine to California.

Like similar upset victories by Democrats against Republicans, the Democratic candidate was entirely focused on working class issues…

Taylor Rehmet spent his career fighting for better pay, safer workplaces, and a seat at the table for working Texans. He won election by leveraging his career as a working class machinist and President of the Texas state chapter of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers to win the support of workers and middle class voters in a very red, Republican district.

As a union president and machinist, Rehmet believes the best way to raise wages, protect jobs, and ensure dignity on the job is through strong unions and worker power. He would lead efforts to repeal anti-union laws, expand collective bargaining, and bring good-paying, union jobs back to Texas communities. He also supports reclassifying gig workers to guarantee benefits and will fight for apprenticeship pipelines that create career paths for the next generation.

Affordable housing is a priority issue for middle and working class families. Rehmet supports statewide rent stabilization, tenant protections, and deep investment in public and nonprofit housing.

As a graduate of public schools Rehmet wants to reinvest in public education, expand high school vocational programs, and reverse the privatization of Texas schools by way of tax-payer dollars. He supports fully funding public schools and ending private school voucher schemes that drain them.

In recent years religious bigots and extremists have been taking over public school boards in the attempt to impose religious beliefs on students. Rehmet wants to protect public education from privatization, and keep extremist politics and religious ideology out of the classroom. He also supports teacher raises, mental health staff in every school, and strict oversight to prevent school boards from banning books or invading student privacy.

Texas is the largest state by land area in the continental US, and Rehmet says he’ll fight to stop the selloff of public lands to developers, safeguard water access, and invest in rural conservation jobs. He also believes environmental justice must include the people who live closest to the land, farmers, ranchers, rural communities, and Native American tribal authorities.

For years Republicans, especially in large states, have been trying to chisel away at voting rights for poor people and minority groups. Rehmet says he will fight to end racial and partisan gerrymandering by pushing for an independent redistricting commission and ensuring communities of color aren’t cracked or packed out of power. He also supports legislation that increases transparency in the redistricting process, creates enforceable protections for minority voting blocs, and strengthens the Voting Rights Act.

For progressives all over America, Rehmet’s victory is so much more significant than electing a progressive to office. Most importantly, Rehmet is not only a populist/progressive who won an election, but a populist progressive who won an election in a deeply red, Republican district that voted overwhelmingly for Trump.

Rehmet won because he emphasized issues that were important to working, middle class voters and offering solutions that were practical, realistic, pragmatic and politically achievable. With elections for Congress only a few months away, Rehmet’s victory is a roadmap for progressives to follow if they want to take back Congress and halt America’s descent into fascism.Email

Ken Bank

Ken Bank is a semi-retired business executive, part-time playwright, and freelance writer with masters degrees in business and history. He lives in New Jersey and is active in the local Democratic Party organization in support of progressive policies.