A lot of people are very confused about the recent Supreme Court decision in US v Booker. As a "leader" of a group that advocates for Sixth Amendment rights (trial by jury) and an independent judiciary, in lieu of the "Modern Sentencing Reform System" that is under fire today, I feel obligated to lend a lay-voice to understanding these new developments.

The Past

In the mid-1980's, US lawmakers bent to the will of a get-tough-on-drugs crowd and gave birth to two kinds of sentencing schemes. They were given two different names. Names were very important when the 'modern reformists' began carving out new laws for the federal system.

A civil servant, be it Immigration, Customs, Border Patrol is likely to have a combat veteran as supervisor at some level. Or is my assumption wrong?  Might prove a good project for the Government Accounting Office. How many law enforcement officers are combat veterans? If they could answer with anonymity, a series of questions would flush out those that likely had a degree of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome and dose of Political Betrayal Trauma -- a hard cocktail for human consumption it now appears, but little has been said about it for lay-people -- all the 'us' out there, living and working with combat veterans.

My father was one, and my brother did his share of training and supervising co-workers in the field. Both of them had Marine Corps training, thought in military terms even around the house, and so we might ask when we ponder this leadership quagmire in Law Enforcement Agencies -- who are they? What makes them tick?

I introduce my father, through letters to his mother during World War II -- Earl Edward Callahan. I do not 'doctor' the racist language -- as these World War II vets, recruited to build border security following World War II were not unlike my father, and likely made up the bulk of the men on the Border Patrol in the late 40's and 50's -- some backdrop for agency problems today, perhaps. For any pain it brings to readers, I'm sorry.

Having more reason, than time to focus on the myriad of feelings that comes with civil service and corruption, my brother's prison sentence lends me time to ponder, with 14 seemingly endless years and counting . . .

A common emotion rolls through each never-ending session; roars up, entwining with crushing force; surfaces again. It is absolutely underlying, cloying, persistent throughout. I find it in people and circumstance that still, years later, I'm forced to consider. It is the hardest issue to confront, reason enough to start notebooks, diaries or blogs, no doubt, the stuff made of madness throughout. It's an emotion, and also a human act.

My father told me that he was glad to leave the copper mines, and had been just itching to go to war, and defend his country and family. He enlisted, was allowed to return home to say goodbye to his father, Ed Callahan dying of miner's lung and not yet 50 years old. Halfway to the South Pacific my dad got a telegram that his father had died. I have the letters he wrote to his mother, Nora -- I'm her namesake. They are sad indeed.

I've briefly explained my father's penchant for war stories, but there is more to add. I think that part of the problem that civil servants have, is due to the policy that converts military and combat service particularly, into domestic and other kinds of civilian and international policing. And so, I continue my story.

Bill Conroy's, Borderline Security has prompted me to begin this notebook, blog, or diary. http://www.narconews.com/Issue32/article893.html

Why do we have warlords or whistleblowers, and fewer civil servants in between the extremes? The topic begs for discussion, and I have some personal thoughts of my own to share.

My father was a combat veteran of World War II, my mother a suburban pioneer with a lifetime of hurt behind her -- or thinking so when I came along in 1953. Growing up on white bread and thousands of bloody war stories, my oral history was punctuated by fantastic tales of survival in the 'hardest times there were.' The Great Depression and World War II were as steady a stream in our home as tea, coffee and old friends. I was raised under the shadow of remarkable events.

I was never sure if I was supposed to be grateful for growing up in cold war peace, and shopping ample aisles of grocery stores, or to feel guilty that I was. So I did both.

My public education included 'duck and cover' exercises in school.  People who love peace, having lots of enemies -- a tired line, revived today -- was literally drilled into me as a child.

"How is that supposed to keep us alive if the A-bomb hits?" I would ask my teacher, after we pulled our terrified bodies from under our desks. Furthermore, how do you study after a near death experience?