Category Archives: Homeland Security

Confessions of an ICE Agent

Posted on by
Reply

Being the imagined Minneapolis musings of one Officer Ahab, ICE Captain 

Here they come. Twenty of us and only about 2,000 of them. Is that a trash can lid strapped to that guy’s chest? And pink hair to complete the look. Geez, these people never give up. What do we have to do? These freaks will never comply. And orders are orders. So here I am, geared up and ready again. 

Ready for what? I don’t think Bovino knows anymore either, but here we go. 

I was here in the eighties, I remember, we drove up from KC to see the Farm Aid show at a big club here. There was a great act from Nashville, wish I could remember who it was. That place  should be right down this street, if I’m right. I remember that night, thinking what a clean and beautiful city this was, and what fair people lived in it. 

Not anymore. It looks like Black Hawk Down around here nowadays — where are the white faces? This place is a criminal shithole now. How does that happen? Who let it happen?

Is that dude lighting a Molotov? Why do they do it? I’ll never understand, as long as I live, why people defy law enforcement. I mean, there is nothing in it but trouble. Nothing to gain, because we are the law and they are not. Nothing could be more crystal clear. 

They can never win against us. 

Still, here they come. 

The woman, the woman, the woman. Why did she have to have that name? They will not let that dyke rest—and that libtard bitch almost took one of us out—but they don’t care. They just keep coming, like fucking lemmings. 

Third from left, my man’s been hanging at the gym and hugging the bar, feeling no pain tonight. Watch that one. 

Here he comes. God he’s big. 

“I haven’t shot anybody!” They don’t listen, they don’t care, I’m just a uniform. I wasn’t in that group, I don’t know what their shit was, and I don’t care. I won’t be losing any sleep over that freak, absolutely none. Dipshit had it coming, that’s it and that’s all. You can’t put that on me, He engaged and paid the price. I wasn’t in that group. I’m just doing my job. 

It’s my job. This is my job! Goddamn anyone who calls me a murderer for doing my job! 

This is when I really feel it, letting the gas rip through them. There’s your first amendment, motherfuckers! There’s your due process! Suck it up and feel the power! 

Those people weren’t murdered anyway. None of us are murderers, we’re law enforcement and that’s the end of it. No one will touch us—and no one better try. If someone in the crowd gets hurt, well, that’s how it goes in America, every day. No one is safe. And justice never sleeps. 

Reminds me—soon as I’m out of uniform, pick up that scrip at Safeway, and try to get some sleep. 

Who Will We Choose to Be?

Posted on by
Reply

America stands at a crossroads. Are Nebraskans willing to decide? Or will many ignore history and choose the path of least resistance, comfortable in the safety of their whiteness (for now)?

Ask yourself: Was Joe Biden elected president in 2020? Current president Donald Trump says no, that he won the election and Biden stole it. There is zero credible evidence for this assertion. But here we are, more than five years later, with insurrectionists on the loose, pardoned by the president. Several have been arrested for new crimes. One—Jared Wise—is a senior advisor at the Justice Department.

Does the First Amendment guarantee freedom of speech? Is due process of law guaranteed to “any person,” as it says in the Fourteenth Amendment, before they can be deprived of their liberty?

What kind of system does the president prefer? He told America in 2018 that he and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un had “fallen in love.” He has said that he admires the “loyalty” the people have for Kim (loyalty which is state-mandated), and Trump has said he wishes Americans would display that same reverence for him. It’s quite similar to statements he’s made praising “president for life” Vladimir Putin’s post-democratic Russia.

And during his second term, MAGA has repeatedly floated this idea of a third term, as well as a dynastic transfer of power to one of Trump’s children.

On Sept. 12, when a Fox News reporter asked Trump about the current rash of political violence on the right and left, offering him a chance to call for calm and national unity, he had this to say:

“The radicals on the right are radical because they don’t want to see crime … The radicals on the left are the problem – and they are vicious and horrible and politically savvy.”

The statement appears to make the claim that right-wing political violence stems from righteous anger at lawlessness, while left-wing radicals are simply “vicious”. Seizing the moment, Attorney General Pam Bondi noted

that the Justice Department would “go after” Americans for “hate speech,” a statement she later walked back.

But just recently, Nebraska Senator Deb Fischer told Nebraska Public Media, “It’s not free speech to celebrate the death of someone,” and that those who do so need to be “held responsible.”

***

Now the National Guard is spreading nationwide—Portland is next— coordinating with ICE and behaving as an occupying force rather than the emergency-response “citizen army” that is their charter.

Nebraska Governor Jim Pillen is all in, circumventing the legislature to offer the McCook prison facility to ICE for detainment of those they sweep up in raids of workplaces, streets, and residential neighborhoods.

But they are not sweeping up the white male citizens who dominate the American assassination game in their dragnet.

Meanwhile Pete Hegseth, our hair-sprayed celebrity Secretary of Defense, has called every single flag officer in the US armed forces, wherever they may be, to an auditorium in Quantico, Va., on Sept. 30, ostensibly to hear a speech from him.

Many officers reportedly fear a loyalty purge well beyond the anti-DEI cuts to the GOFO (General Officer/Flag Officer) ranks Hegseth has made thus far. Aside from that, it is an unprecedentedly expensive and dangerous gathering that will impact military readiness in multiple active theaters of war. Is that important?

As a matter of history, at least one retired general pointed out online that Hitler called a meeting of all of his general officers in 1935 to extract a loyalty pledge prior to implementing his domestic plans. Hegseth’s winking response? “Cool story, General.”

And at a recent memorial for a MAGA-friendly pundit who was just the latest political figure—this time on the right—to be assassinated by a disturbed man with a gun, White House senior advisor on immigration Stephen Miller harkens back to a famous speech of the 1940s. He dramatically describes the “storm” that this particular killing has generated, rhetorically transforming the trigger-pulling “him” into a non- specific, broadly threatening, anti-American “they”—then switching to an ominous “You”:

“They cannot conceive of the army that they have arisen in all of us…You have nothing. You are nothing. You are wickedness. You are jealousy. You are envy. You are hatred. You are nothing.”

You get the idea. The many thousands in the crowd, in their Trump gear, heard him loud and clear. One man’s car was painted with the slogan, “Tolerance Killed Charlie Kirk.”

Now the environment appears right for Pam Bondi to make good Trump’s threat to prosecute his political enemies, as former FBI director James Comey—a lifelong Republican—faces a Justice Department indictment.

Of course, the administration’s “border czar”, Tom Homan, was just reported to have taken $50,000 in bribes from the FBI. The Justice Department apparently will not prosecute, and his job appears safe.

But it seems Trump will not rest until he finds a prosecutor to charge a member of the Federal Reserve—one he wants out—with a crime of his invention.

Former President Obama is being “investigated.” Former UN ambassador John Bolton’s home was recently raided. Dozens of career government prosecutors have been fired, and some are being investigated, for working on the January 6 insurrection cases.

Constitutional Republic or fanatical patriot cult? Respectful political opposition and rule of law, or constant attempts to frighten and dominate domestic “enemies” with dehumanizing Christian Nationalist rhetoric and veiled threats against citizens, all emanating from openly partisan elected officials? Which will it be, Nebraska?

As someone who wasn’t born in America, I think I’ve made my choice.

Commentary originally submitted and accepted by the Nebraska Examiner. I declined requested rewrites demanded from a “national editor (not the Nebraska Examiner editor), so the article was not published. I provide the final submitted version here.

Happy 250th Birthday to the United States Army 

Posted on by
Reply

On June 14, we wished our United States Army a happy 250th birthday. It was a significant day for me, having grown up around the world among soldiers, sailors, airmen and their families. 

My father, George Wees, was born in Omaha to second-generation Polish immigrants. His father, Francis Wees, built houses in South Omaha, including the house he, my grandmother, and their nine children called home, near 38th and G. Dad attended Creighton Prep and graduated from the US Military Academy at West Point in 1958. 

I was born a few years later, in Heidelberg, in then-West Germany. Young Lieutenant Wees was on one of his early assignments working with the newly established West German military, via a NATO attachment, to establish secure government communications networks just miles away from Soviet-allied East Germany.  

In 1966, Dad received orders for Vietnam. He was to advise a South Vietnamese Army unit in the burgeoning conflict between the communist North and the democratic South. He parked my mother and us kids in a little duplex in East Omaha, and off he went to spend a year on the other side of the globe. 

Cadet George Wees in his West Point dorm room
Cadet George Wees, USMA 1958

I remember, he furnished us with a little tape recorder and microphone, and he and my mother exchanged tapes, in addition to near-daily letters, during his deployment. She still has the tapes. In some of his messages, you hear the gunfire in the distance. And at those times, you hear a bit of unsteadiness in the young lieutenant’s voice.

When Dad returned in 1967, he was stationed at the Pentagon, now a Captain. We lived in a little house across from a park in Vienna, Virginia, where I attended kindergarten and first grade. It was there that I really got to know him. He set up a dark room in the basement to pursue his photography hobby, bought a Mustang for the Pentagon commute, and patiently hosted siblings from Omaha who wanted to come visit Washington.

But by 1969, it was time for his second tour in Vietnam. Back we came to Omaha, to another little house on 43rd and Center, a rental owned by friends. There my mother, sister and I would wait out another year of war. That is, if Dad survived. 

By this time, things were less taut, less military, and problems extended from the front to the rear. In command of American troops near Nha Trang, Dad survived at least one attempt on his life—from his own troops. 

Because by this point, many of the young draftees were convinced the war was pointless. Eventually, after resisting the notion for years, Colonel Wees agreed with me that the war, through Democratic and Republican administrations, was ill-conceived and badly executed. 

In other words, pointless.

But we should remember that rank and file soldiers like my dad only served. None of it was their idea, nor did they make the big decisions. That was the province of civilian leadership in Washington—folks who would soon be ousted, many imprisoned, the president resigning in disgrace. 

Our current civilian leader, who has already been disgraced by multiple felony convictions and a sexual assault judgment against him, used the occasion of the Army’s birthday to throw a party and have a parade. 

The Army, as always, followed the commander-in-chief’s orders, and rolled the tanks down Constitution Avenue in a light rain as the president attempted a few salutes. Nearby, at Arlington National Cemetery, Dad rested.  

Though drafted, the president never served (bone spurs), and according to witnesses, he has labeled as “suckers and losers” the rank-and-file soldiers who make up the service. His campaign-style speech to West Point’s 2025 graduating class—complete with MAGA hat— was thin on talk of duty or honor.

But those cadets did what cadets do. They listened to the president troll and dismiss his predecessor, threaten his political “enemies”, invent “facts”, and brag about himself, without visibly reacting, except to politely applaud as they shared their achievement with the commander-in-chief. 

That’s what it looks like when doing one’s duty, honorably, for one’s country. It looks like discipline, because that’s what is required to lead. 

Happy 250th birthday to the United States Army. May you continue to serve and protect the Constitution, and to quietly obey the lawful orders of whatever civilian leadership the voters place above you, for centuries to come.

Written for the Nebraska Examiner

https://nebraskaexaminer.com/2025/07/08/celebrating-250-years-of-the-u-s-army/

There Are No Words

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve read many of the words pouring out from well-intentioned souls in the wake of our latest school massacre, just as I do each time it happens. Like others, I suppose I’m compelled to look—in vain—at what might just be the solution, finally, to America’s unique problem of near-daily mass murder sprees.

Obviously, the words don’t help. Like thoughts, like prayers, words in the newspaper are just that—words. Not action. Not change. Not conviction. Just words.

And words go away, like yesterday’s news, wrapped around today’s catch, ultimately headed to the waste bin. Worse, words today are weaponized, with truth itself under investigation as “alternatives” to evidence-based reality abound. 

And when truth becomes a casualty of politics, as it often does, as it is right now: words become absolutely meaningless. 

Yesterday, I was reading the “news” about the January 6 panel’s far-reaching evidence showing that the president of the United States set in motion a dedicated, coordinated campaign to overturn the 2020 election results. In the middle of that online article was a garish ad for a gold coin engraved with Trump’s profile, as if it were some coin of the realm (which it is—his realm).

Which Trump do you like, the insurrectionist or the hero? Take your pick. Your preferred version places you into one of the two Americas from which we now must choose. Because it’s looking  like no denizen of either country wants to be a citizen of the other’s. 

Of course, both claim to be the “real” America. So like Solomon presented with two women claiming the same infant, we have an apparently insoluble problem. But unlike Solomon, we cannot threaten to cleave the nation in two in a gambit to reveal the liar, because that’s already done and the liar has taken his half. Try as they might to convince “America” that Donald Trump should be held responsible for the insurrection he fomented, the January 6 panel can only hope to bring the evidence to one of the Americas. The other one is tuned in to Fox News (which is, of course, skipping the hearings). 

People who associate unfettered access to firearms with their personal freedom—and defense of that access with heroism—will never support new legal limitations on same. People whose children have been murdered with another child’s rifle, and those who empathize with them, will never stop pushing for those legal limitations. 

People who feel they can no longer tolerate the outcomes of the democratic process will seek to undermine it and ultimately discredit it, just as those who see the danger the first group poses will seek to shore up our democratic institutions, to protect our fragile experiment in self-government. 

If you want the future to go either of these two ways, the same avenue is open to you as has always been open to you: your vote. Unless you are a public figure accountable to the public, that’s all you really have. I agree it’s not much power. 

However, en masse, those who vote for Congressional Republicans are now, whatever they tell themselves about Christian values or whatnot, voting with Trump and with the gun lobby. They are voting for a Big Lie and for more dead children. That’s undeniable, because the vast majority of GOP elected officials support both Trump’s Big Lie and the gun lobby’s forever agenda of “more guns and fewer restrictions on them.” If re-elected in 2022 they can be expected to stay on this course. 

Likewise, all who vote against Republicans are voting for the preservation of democracy, or at least for some hope in that direction, and for a beginning to the end of the gun lobby’s vice grip  on our political culture. They don’t need to be heroes—just public servants who get the “servant” part.

No words that I or anyone else says will change the dynamics of this contest. Only whether—and how—you exercise your power in November matters. It’s in your hands.

(Composed but not submitted for publication)

NATO’s Child

Posted on by
Reply

“How smart is that? And he’s gonna go in and be a peacekeeper…We could use that on our southern border…here’s a guy who’s very savvy.”

— Donald Trump’s comments on Vladimir Putin’s military incursion into Ukraine’s Eastern regions, Feb. 22, 2022

I’ll never forget candidate Donald Trump’s first campaign trail attack on NATO in 2016. According to Vanity Fair, the telegraphed threat to our democratic allies came mere hours after Trump secured the Republican presidential nomination. When asked how he would deal with a Russian attack on the Baltic nations, Trump said U.S. aid would be dependent upon whether those countries “fulfilled their obligations to us.”

The question to Trump referenced Article 5, which represents the core mission of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization alliance as embodied in the concept of Collective Defense. It “requires that an attack against one ally is considered as an attack against all allies,” according to NATO. Article 5 was first invoked after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when NATO member states came to America’s aid.

To someone who had grown up in the shadow of NATO — to an American whose father proudly contributed to NATO’s mission in Europe — Donald Trump’s words already sounded like treason. 

But it got worse. Throughout his chaotic presidency, Trump regularly threatened NATO allies and repeatedly told aides he wanted the United States to withdraw from NATO, according to the New York Times. 

The American president wanted to shatter this 70-year-old mutually protective alliance between the great democracies of Europe and America. 

Does anyone still wonder why?

***

In 1962, my South Omaha-born Polish father, West Point graduate and recently minted Army Lt. George Wees, was stationed in Heidelberg in then-West Germany. His Signal Corps unit was assisting the newly authorized military of the recently admitted NATO member state. I was born at the spartan Army hospital there, just a few months before the October Missile Crisis. 

World War II had ended for our Heidelberg home some 17 years earlier. Evidence of the Cold War now surrounded us, including Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s brand-new Berlin Wall. 

A decade later, in 1973, Dad was ordered to the NATO command in southern Italy, so off we went. We lived near Pozzuoli, a small town on the Bay of Naples, in a country house. Dad worked for what was then called the Allied Forces Southern Europe (AFSOUTH) command, located on a bucolic campus in downtown Naples.

I remember when, in 1974, we learned that NATO member state Greece was stepping away from its role in the AFSOUTH military command. This was a result of an attack by Turkish forces on Cyprus. It felt like a shock: The Greek military was leaving us. 

In those days, even such a small ripple in the fabric of our stability was significant. The Cold War was very real to us, though very hushed, like a terrible secret. We kids knew the dangerous business our parents were engaged in, so we listened closely. Hot spots like Cyprus could become another Korea, another Vietnam. Or something much worse. 

NATO’s strength in numbers felt like our strength. Its diminution felt like our weakness.

***

With the Soviet Union long gone, some now ask, what is America’s interest in NATO? I might respond with the French aphorism: Plus ça change…. Because NATO’s purpose was never to protect Europe from the USSR, as some choose to believe. Its purpose was — and is — to protect all those who value democratic self-determination and the rule of law from those who do not. 

And it’s not just NATO’s job. It’s ours, too. Because as we have been repeatedly reminded lately, some wield power for themselves alone — for their own interests against the interests of peace, against the community of nations and against the rule of law. How well we live up to our ideals is not the question at times such as these. The question is how much we value the preservation of our way of life, the pursuit of our ideals and the legal protections for both traditions afforded by our Constitution. 

A benevolent and peaceful American future is not assured. As we should know by now, the relative peace and economic cooperation that has allowed Europe and America to thrive since the end of World War II is constantly under threat from morally unmoored opportunists like Vladimir Putin — and Donald Trump. 

(The above appeared originally in the online Nebraska Examiner 02/26/2022 under the headline “Ukraine and future of the NATO alliance”)