Mohandas Karamachand Gandhi, one of the most influential figures in modern social and political activism, considered these traits to be the most spiritually perilous to humanity. [2]
• Wealth without Work
• Pleasure without Conscience
• Science without Humanity
• Knowledge without Character
• Politics without Principle
• Commerce without Morality
• Worship without Sacrifice
Most of us know the term “SWAT” as a reference to an inter-agency team of enforcement personnel who engage in operations to put drug lords and other illegal groups out of business using sophisticated weaponry and state-of-the-art intelligence-gathering methods. A client of mine uses "swat" operation when referring to a complex series of seemingly unrelated actions by a series of governmental agencies, including agencies of judicial, executive and legislative branches, often with the participation and assistance of private individual or corporate informants, to profit from the destruction, silencing, asset seizure or blackmail of an individual or company who is out of favor with or has offended some individual or group in power. The purpose of the swat operation is to satisfy the goals of one or more private special interest groups or governmental covert operations, or both. Ghandi’s perceptive observation about the traits most spiritually harmful to humanity, in a few words, goes a great distance in explaining what the point of the swat operation is. I have spent the last seven years of my practice witnessing, and attempting to deal with, the legal aspects of swat operations apparently conducted at both federal and state levels, in all branches of government, with the assistance of government contractors and unwitting participants alike.
The most challenging aspect of this type of practice is convincing those who are targets [3] or witnesses of the swat operation that it does, in fact, exist. After all, covert operations are conducted under cover. The very nature of a successful covert operation is to achieve its goals without the general public’s being aware that a single force is responsible for what appears to be a series of unrelated events. In my experience, the bigger the lie, the easier it is to pull off.
Let us think of the covert or swat operation as having two primary “teams”:
(1) the covert, willful perpetrators, and those who deliberately or unwittingly assist them (other “participants”), referred to as the “swat team,” and
(2) the “target team,” comprised of the target and the target’s friends, family members, business colleagues and legal and other contractors hired to deal with the swat operation.
As will become clear, it is not necessary to the success of a covert operation that each participant on the swat team has the same or even similar interests to those of other participants, that participants belong to the same political party or recognized social class, or even that the participants know each other. It is also true that individuals not infrequently operate on both teams. Likewise, oftentimes, members of the target’s team search in vain for reasons to believe that there is no swat, but rather a series of unfortunate events brought on by the failure of the target to be perfect. As one of my clients is fond of saying, “there’s always a parking ticket.” This form of denial arises from a false understanding of how the larger economic and social systems operate and often is strong enough to survive despite even overwhelming evidence to contradict the party line put forth by members of the swat team.
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