You’ll Believe Anything - The Bizarre Backstory of the CPSC SWAT Team Urban Legend

Over the past 11 months, publications like The ABA Journal, National Review, The Washington Times, The Wall Street Journal, Salon, The Weekly Standard, Portland Press Herald, The American Conservative, Huffington Post, Touchstone Magazine, and others have repeated the bogus claim that the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) has its own Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) team. Except for the Wall Street Journal, the assertion remains uncorrected as far as I’ve found, and many of those stories came after that correction.

This false urban legend even recently tripped up Ken Timmerman, who is seeking the Republican nomination to be Maryland’s lieutenant governor. On May 29, he tweeted that it is a Second Amendment issue. Timmerman is the running mate of Charles Lollar, and the Lollar-Timmerman campaign press office did not respond to my request for a comment.

Where did the misinformation originate?

The short answer is that a writer leapt to an erroneous conclusion that other writers are trusting without question. If that were all there were to it, I might not bother writing this. In the quarter century that I’ve covered CPSC, I’ve seen plenty of wrong information written about it, ranging from the silly to the outlandish to the misinformed to the downright stupid. Correcting it all isn’t my job; I’m neither the Snopes of CPSC nor the PolitiFact.

Besides, my readers typically are quite savvy about CPSC matters and are able to identify the balderdash themselves. Indeed, some of them probably are thinking right now, “What next, Sean, a story about how CPSC doesn’t have an office on the moon?” Yeah, I hear ya.

However, the long answer has a rather more bizarre backstory that unfolds much like that wonderful, old BBC show, Connections, in which James Burke would start with some oddball historical fact – say, the creation of Kellogg's Cornflakes – and then take the audience through a series of effects, syntheses, and parallel occurrences to something unexpected, like the founding of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. (That’s from an actual 1997 episode, What’s in a Name, by the way).

On the other hand, when the CPSC SWAT fable starts getting weird, perhaps a better comparison might be to some sci-fi conspiracy-theory movie.

But first, what are the facts?

CPSC does not have and has never had a SWAT team. It has neither the budget nor the statutory authority to support one. Indeed, CPSC staffers do not and never have carried any firearms as part of their jobs. Moreover, CPSC does not use, send, or order up other agencies’ SWAT teams.

The most that can be said factually on that last point is that sometimes CPSC works with other agencies at the federal, state or local levels in situations like the service of criminal warrants – CPSC doesn’t perform tasks like that – and occasionally those agencies might decide they need special help like SWAT teams or bomb squads.

However, the SWAT teams are not CPSC’s call. Indeed, when I asked the agency what factors might go into it making a request for armed assistance (never mind a SWAT team), the response was “CPSC does not request such action because CPSC does not [do things like] execute criminal search warrants. The execution of a lawful search warrant and the details involving that are left to authorized law enforcement.”

Thus, in the SWAT team myth, CPSC is the subject of false-guilt by association.

It’s important to understand how insidious this urban legend can be. Beyond creating the silly image that agency staff can dial up SWAT teams like comic book character Commissioner Gordon reaching for the Bat Phone, it distorts the public’s perception (or perhaps taps into its misunderstanding) about what the agency is and what it does.

Indeed, it causes conflation. Not only does the rare decision to bring in a SWAT team belong to someone other than CPSC, the separate issue of the underlying CPSC safety regulations leading to such a situation is immaterial to that decision. Yet, “CPSC SWAT team” conjures up an incorrect image – to use a phrase coined in 1981 by Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.) – of “jack-booted government thugs” terrorizing citizens over minor, mala prohibita, regulatory offences (say selling Kinder Eggs – see sidebar at right).

The current source of the CPSC SWAT error is a 2013 book by Radley Balko: Rise of the Warrior Cop, In it, he mentions CPSC only twice and only very briefly without elaboration. Balko’s source for his CPSC assertions is a 2006 Wired Magazine article, which I discuss more later.

Rise of the Warrior Cop explores the concern that civilian law enforcement agencies in the United States at all levels – local, state, and federal – have been overly militarized during the past three or four decades. In Balko’s view, Officer Friendly in his blue uniform and black-and-white cruiser has been replaced by testosterone-driven paramilitary units intent on finding any excuse to use their SWAT training and gear.

The militarization of police is a legitimate and important topic that needs to be scrutinized, explored and debated as demonstrated by this recent story of a Georgia 2-year-old who was critically burned by a flash bang grenade that landed in his crib during a drug raid. This article is not intended to minimize or dispute Balko’s overall assertions. I certainly recognize that a few wrong facts among hundreds or thousands do not necessarily invalidate an entire thesis.

Balko himself wrote the story that The Wall Street Journal corrected. That correction is rather large and involves agencies beyond the brief portion covering CPSC. Balko told me that he agrees with and, indeed, initiated the CPSC part after hearing from the agency. But he said that he disagrees with other parts of the correction, especially where there’s a semantic debate about the term SWAT team, which he points out has “always been loosely applied” – is it an official SWAT team or does it just do SWAT-like things? He said he’s thought about writing a public response to those elements of the correction but told me, “Ultimately, I keep concluding that it’s better to just leave it be than to draw attention to it by picking a public fight with the WSJ.” He also objected to how the paper handled a misunderstanding about whether he re-called agencies for the article as opposed to calling them initially for his book.

I’ll leave those disagreements at that as they involve matters other than CPSC.

As for the CPSC portion, Balko said he did try unsuccessfully to call the agency for comment while researching his book. Further, on CPSC’s initial, but now removed, treatment in The Wall Street Journal article, he explained to me, “The reason I expounded on the CPSC raid a bit more in the WSJ essay is because one of the editors specifically asked me to focus on militarization and raids beyond the drug war. In retrospect, I should have done more research before including it in the essay. That's my mistake, which is why I personally asked for that particular correction.”

He maintains his concern about the possible problems associated with potential SWAT team presence in some CPSC-related matters. He also responded to me that he has reached out to some of the other publications about the CPSC error and that future editions of Rise of the Warrior Cop will make it clear that it was not a CPSC SWAT team used in the situation he references.

Unfortunately, however, the genie is out of the bottle.

What prodded me finally to look at the matter more deeply (rather than askance at it) were pieces in April by John Fund in the National Review Online and M.D Harmon in the Portland Press Herald. Both writers repeated the CPSC error as fact when trying to write something about the armed standoff in Nevada involving cattle rancher Cliven Bundy’s supporters and the Bureau of Land Management. The idea that CPSC or similarly-surprising agencies might have SWAT teams jibed nicely with the Bundy situation to allow suggestions of the feds getting scary powerful and belligerent.

Since then, in late May, Bill Gertz wrote a piece in the Washington Times about a 2010 presidential directive (amended in 2012) updating the rules on how the military can give assistance to civil authorities in extreme situations like civil unrest. The reaction to the article – speaking of conflation – seems to blur the distinctions among contingency plans, unlikely scenarios, and goals.

But in any event, Gertz too repeated the CPSC SWAT team factoid when discussing “a buildup of military units within non-security-related federal agencies, notably the creation of [SWAT] teams.” (This is the story that led to Timmerman’s misfire about the Second Amendment.)

The fallout of Fund’s widely-cited piece, and now Gertz’s, is that a web search of the word SWAT with either product safety or CPSC will find many websites (some with names like Prophesy News Watch, The Last Great Stand, End Times Update, or The Resistance United) linking to the articles as pretexts for diatribes about how President Barack Obama’s federal government knows no bounds in its arrogance and pursuit of power.

That’s especially humorous – in at least the case of the CPSC SWAT team factoid – because the incident behind the myth occurred 11 years ago this month and spurred similar diatribes about how President George W. Bush’s federal government knew no bounds in its arrogance and pursuit of power.

Some, like Agitprop, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll, or Inspired Economist, saw a Bush “War on Science” in CPSC’s actions while others, like users of Grass City, a marijuana legalization site, saw crony-capitalist collusion between a corrupt CPSC and big business to suppress environmentally-friendly, free-energy motor-vehicle fuel systems (which, by the way, would not fall under CPSC’s jurisdiction, but hey, facts-schmacks).

Given that history, I find it quite probable that the list of publications in the first paragraph would lean more to the left rather than to the right had John McCain or Mitt Romney won their presidential bids. In other words, left wingers, don’t gloat about the current foibles of your right leaning pals: It turns out that neither the anti-Bush nor the anti-Obama concerns related to CPSC and its phantom SWAT team stand up well in factual context.

Rather, both involve the stuff of great urban legends: paranoia, specious reasoning, out-of-context facts, confirmation bias, jumping to conclusions, and the evolution of a story from truth to fantasy via the “telephone game” phenomenon. Like any good urban legend, it can pop up again and again, promoting all kinds of viewpoints, even opposing ones.

So what’s this talk about a CPSC “raid”?

First, I must point out that raid is a term that CPSC strenuously and repeatedly objected to when I was asking questions for this story. Although I must give a nod to Balko’s observation about semantics, I get the agency’s concerns.

The presence of a SWAT team at a law enforcement action is not necessarily a “raid” any more than the presence of a sheriff is an “arrest.” What matters is what happened, and the best that I can piece together from press accounts is that rifles and a battering ram were present but went unused. The authorities may have demanded via megaphone, rather than a knock on the door, that one person come out of the house. The two people at the search site cooperated peacefully and were detained temporarily in handcuffs but released as not a risk before the search was even over.

The agencies present at this execution of a search warrant, besides CPSC, were the U.S. Marshals Service, the New Mexico State Police, and the Albuquerque Police Department. There was a SWAT team there, CPSC confirmed, as well as officers trained in chemicals and explosives.

The SWAT team belonged to the Albuquerque police.

Of course it did.

Right now, there are klaxons aroogahing in the minds of those familiar with debates about police brutality. Of any departments that might currently complicate a story like this, that city’s might be the top one. It’s been the subject of controversy for years related to concerns about excessive use of deadly force. Just this April, it was the target of a report by the U.S. Justice Department that found its “officers too frequently use deadly force against people who pose minimal threats” or “use less lethal force, including Tasers, on people who are passively resisting, non-threatening, observably unable to comply with orders, or pose only a minimal threat to officers.” The report further criticized the department’s treatment of mentally ill people and those in crisis. As I was finishing up this story in late May and early June, there were related protests in the city, prompted in part by the shooting death by the police of a homeless and mentally handicapped man last March.

Stop. Take a breath. Repeat: “Conflation, conflation, conflation.”

Those problems today and presence of the Albuquerque SWAT team 11 years ago are not necessarily substantively related. Remember that the search warrant occurred peacefully. Yes, it might be valid to look into whether the decision to have the team there – regardless of the outcome – was justified or somehow related to the department’s problems. I’ll leave that to other reporters (Balko maybe?) as it only tangentially involves what I write about: CPSC. Besides, I doubt the Albuquerque police are in any mood right now to be cooperative with such questions from a reporter. It would delay this story probably indefinitely. It is also possible that the U.S. Marshals or state police requested the local SWAT team or that all three law enforcement agencies conferred.

CPSC responded it does not know why the Albuquerque SWAT team was there. It told me simply, “Law enforcement may have had considerations based on the circumstances they encountered at the time in making the determination of how the criminal search warrant would be executed.”

There are facts about this case that might provide possible clues as to those considerations (justification is a separate question). Some of those facts are quite bizarre, and in asking “Was X why? Did you know about X?” I found myself sometimes embarrassed to be bringing up topics that I’d never have predicted I’d discuss with CPSC, which, by the way, stressed, “We cannot comment on whether the Marshals or local law enforcement were aware of those issues and, therefore, took additional precautions.”

It’s important first to understand the case and the history behind it.

It was a fireworks kits case; thus the presence also of officers who were expert in explosives. At the time, June 2003, CPSC already had a decades-long history of going after such kits, a term that is shorthand for components and chemicals sold either together or separately to the same person or address for likely use in making illegal explosives.

CPSC’s concern involved mail-order and later web-order companies and had two cycles. The first round ran from the early 1980s to the latter part of that decade and involved legal actions against numerous companies. It culminated in the agency’s 1989 victory in the Third Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals that affirmed its strategy of going after not only illegal finished fireworks but also chemicals and components (fuses, tubes, etc.) when sold in certain quantities and configurations.

The second surge began in the late 1990s. CPSC’s reports on its fireworks activity in 1999 and 2000 (respectively issued June 2000 and June 2001) both referred to its renewed interest in kits and components. The latter noted, “CPSC also initiated investigations of firms and individuals who offered kits and components to make illegal and dangerous firecrackers. Several of these sales involved use of the internet.”

There was much speculation at the time from the left wing and the libertarian perpendicular that this attention to fireworks components and chemicals not only was a product of the both the War on Terror (explosives) and War on Drugs (chemicals), but also, as noted above, the supposed Bush-initiated and CPSC-enforced “War on Science” – beliefs tapped into and propelled by the widely read June 2006 Wired piece (all three) as well as an article published a year later in Chemical & Engineering News (science).

The first assumption – the War on Terror angle – certainly might seem initially plausible given the timing less than two years after 9-11 and the fact that numerous similar cases occurred between 2003 and the publication of the Wired article. However, that belief is belied by CPSC’s decades-long history of actions against illegal fireworks and the fact that it began the second round a few years prior to 2001. Indeed, by April, 2001 – five months before the September 11 attacks – the agency already was promoting its legal successes against companies alleged to be selling such kits.

As for a CPSC-enforced Bush “War on Science,” beyond the fact that the fireworks activity began during the Clinton administration, I’ll point out that the company involved in the June 2003 incident – United Nuclear Scientific Equipment and Supplies – not only is still in business today, although relocated from New Mexico to Michigan, it still is selling all kinds of cool, geeky stuff, including radioactive ores and isotopes (in quantities small enough to be legal) not to mention super-strong, large neodyium “SuperMagnets” that it warns can “break arm bones or even crush hands.”

Moreover, the Wired story focused on CPSC’s attention to the company’s sale of certain chemical substances, noting their use in making powder for illegal fireworks, but worrying that there would be a dampening effect on amateur and educational science. However, CPSC’s action didn’t stop the company from selling those. United Nuclear still sells them today. That’s right, it still sells even chemicals that concerned CPSC: potassium perchlorate, aluminum powder, and sulfur. It even notes the usefulness of aluminum powder in making fireworks.

If there was a Bush-initiated “War on Science” in the previous decade, I find hard to make a case that it involved CPSC’s fireworks activity.

The War on Drugs concern is wholly misplaced. On the one hand, I’ll again point to the fact that CPSC did not do much to limit, much less ban, chemical sales. On the other hand is the question of governments barring or controlling the sales of certain laboratory equipment useful in making certain chemical drugs. As troubling as that might be, it has nothing to do with CPSC.

When do we get to the bizarre part?

As I noted at the top, the 2006 Wired piece by Steve Silberman is Balko’s source. I get why Balko read it as he did. It begins with the provocative lede: “The first thing Joy White saw out of her bedroom window was a man running toward her door with an M16.” Then it describes how her husband already was handcuffed outside in just his underwear. I must point out, however, that Silberman never used the words SWAT or raid.

What I find striking about Silberman’s piece – knowing what I now know – is the information that it lacks. That’s not a criticism necessarily. Note that I carefully chose the word lacks over the more critical omits. I don’t know why it wasn’t in there, and Silberman did not respond to my inquiry as to why.

There are all kinds of valid reasons for leaving information out, starting with the possibility that it isn’t revealed or otherwise known to the writer. Even if it is known, deciding what to put in and what to leave out is part of the editorial process. A writer might leave out information if it is only tangentially related to the story. Another valid reason is the belief that the information might unfairly bias the reader against the subject (like a crime suspect’s religion). There are many more. So don’t take this as any sort of condemnation of Silberman; I have no basis to do that. (And don’t conflate my wondering about the missing information with an attempt to invalidate his entire article.)

But I do have to wonder: had information been in there – only briefly, not in detail that I go into below – would I be writing about the SWAT team urban legend? That information is contextual about Joy White’s husband, the president of United Nuclear and a man that Silberman described only as “a physicist” and “a former employee of Los Alamos National Laboratory.”

His name is Robert Lazar, or as he’s more famously known, Bob Lazar. He is difficult to write about because he is very easy to smear. I mean more than it is easy to smear him if you want to do so. I mean he is easy to smear despite wanting to avoid it. Further, writing about him carries the risk that readers will think you’re a little flaky. So I ask you keep those risks in mind and give me the benefit of the doubt that I’m trying to be as neutral and rational as I possibly can be.

This contextual information also was among the topics I raised with CPSC when asking why there was an armed presence. Remember that CPSC said it didn’t make that decision. CPSC staffers responding to my inquiry further said that to the best of their knowledge, the agency’s investigators were unaware of any of these items. I have no reason to think they saw this as anything more than a run-of-the-mill fireworks kits case. Indeed, I suspect – from the narrowly defined perspective of CPSC’s mandate and jurisdiction – that they probably still see it that way.

Let’s start with claims attributed in the media to Lazar himself about his theories for why CPSC went after his company or why the search warrant involved the presences of a SWAT team. I write attributed because I was unsuccessful in my attempt to contact him to verify whether the attributions were accurate.

Some are quite mundane and involve the War on Terror run amok or “War on Science” that I’ve addressed already. Others are not so down to earth.

The first is in a May 2005 story on the website of Las Vegas CBS TV station, KLAS. It included these lines:

Speaking of blasts, his online ads selling pieces of uranium ore understandably caught the attention of several government agencies, especially since he also built a 30-foot long particle accelerator behind his house.

 

“Every government agency you could possibly think of has been here and hassled us, and that includes the SWAT team that woke my wife and I up at 6 in the morning and handcuffed us out on the front lawn.”

 

After various agencies were assured that Lazar wasn't building atomic weapons out behind the barn, agents calmed down.

Elsewhere than the KLAS story, Lazar claimed he was using his supposed homemade particle accelerator (which Silberman did mention briefly) to make lithium-6 deuteride (6LiD). That’s a compound used as the fusion fuel in certain thermonuclear weapons. There are plenty of people who doubt that Lazar was actually doing so. They further question if he actually built a particle accelerator or, even if he did, what that had to do with 6LiD production when the typical method involves much different techniques.

I must note the conspicuous absence of agents from the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration at the execution of the search warrant. You’d think that had there been actual concern about nuclear bombs, someone would have given them a call.

But why would Lazar be making – or at least claim to be making – 6LiD?

The answer is in a May 2006 article in the Albuquerque Journal, which attributed to Lazar two theories about the CPSC action. The first was the familiar War on Terror assertion, and the second:

Lazar's other theory is more sinister: The threats are part of a larger effort to suppress technology he developed that he says could turn tap water into free fuel for every car on the road.

You can watch an 11 minute segment from program called Taboo Science that goes into detail about his claims, but in short, he said the 6LiD was necessary to his hydrogen car technology. There are lots of people who allege Lazar was attempting a free energy fraud. Whatever the truth to those allegations, as I noted above, motor vehicle engines are not in CPSC’s jurisdiction. Free energy scams are not either.

Lazar further had a decades-old reputation as a maverick when it came to pyrotechnics. From 1987 to 2000, he and another man put on an annual, technically-illegal (federal and state authorities seemed to have looked the other way) explosives festival in the Nevada desert billed as “the biggest and most outrageous outlaw pyrotechnic event in the world.” Renamed Desert Blast following the first Gulf War’s use of Desert Storm, it featured not just simply huge fireworks displays, but explosions such as the one described in a different and earlier Wired article by A.J.S. Rayl: “Ominous, deep-black, almost mushroom cloud…Over on the highway, several miles away, traffic has stopped, and spectators watch in a state of awe or disbelief. Maybe they think they’re watching some sort of weird military experiment.” The equipment list for such an event, according to Rayl, included:

More than 400 shells; a single display cart of 100 2-1/2-inch star shells and reports; the giant, double-pinwheel display; bunches of small black-powder rockets with titanium and reports; strobe rockets; various sizes of salutes (including several M-800s); six stealth-black rockets, complete with nose cones and tails; four large barrels of magnesium; 20 gallons of fuel for the gas bombs; propane torches; launching tubes; boxes of extra fuse and wiring…

Now, I’m not pointing out these facts because I’m whining that Desert Blast was too scary and we need protection against such events. Indeed, I have to admit that my inner adolescent country boy gets a big grin on his face watching the news stories of the events from TLC or KLAS. I mean, who wouldn’t want to fly in a helicopter firing a full-auto door gun at a junked car and watch it explode (5:33 in the TLC video)? Who wouldn’t want to watch the blast of a makeshift bomb made from a “half pound of black flash [powder] underneath a gallon of [gasoline]” sloshed into a plastic bucket (3:10 on the KLAS video)? If I had received an invitation to attend, I very well might have.

Further, my inner libertarian shrugs and says, “Hey, if a bunch of consenting adults (minors and pets were barred) want to risk atomizing themselves far enough from civilization in the Nevada desert, more power to them.”

But I have to recognize how this history might have looked in 2003 to law enforcement agents deciding how to handle a warrant and whether to bring along a SWAT team or explosives experts.

The funny thing about Lazar is that even minor seeming details can be the subject of great controversy. Take Silberman’s description of him as “a physicist” and “a former employee of Los Alamos National Laboratory.” It turns out that lots of folks don’t believe even those points to be true.

People looked into his background following his claims in 1989 to have worked at a supposedly super-secret “S4” facility near the infamous Area 51. While there, he said, he had helped in retro-engineering propulsion technology found on extraterrestrial spacecraft. Indeed, his claims are largely responsible for a lot of the mythology and conspiracy theories surrounding the supposed clandestine activity at Nellis Air Force Base.

Stanton Friedman – who, without a doubt, is a physicist – said he looked into the truth of Lazar’s claims to have degrees from both Cal Tech and MIT, but could find only records that Lazar took electronics courses from Pierce Junior College, in Los Angeles, in the late 1970s. Friedman also questions Lazar’s story about what he might have done at Los Alamos, suggesting he had only minor linkage working for an outside contractor rather than as a scientist employed by the facility.

Friedman is no disbeliever or debunker of UFO matters or related theories about government cover-ups. In fact, he is largely responsible for the popularization of the lore about a Roswell, N.M., flying saucer crash. You can read his criticisms of Lazar here or watch him talk about them here.

On the other hand, some folks (including the never-wrong Wikipedia) point to a May 1993 story by Roy Rivenburg in the Los Angeles Times as doing similar research into Lazar’s educational past. But when you read Rivenburg’s story, it does no such thing, simply mentioning the educational controversy in a single sentence that also mentions the conspiracy theory about why the MIT and Cal Tech records are missing: the government supposedly erased them to discredit Lazar’s stories about alien technology.

See what I mean about Lazar being easy to smear even if you don’t want to? However, it’s similarly easy to smear the Albuquerque police right now with all the recent news about brutality against vulnerable populations and violations of Constitutional rights.

I bet a lot of you think rather poorly of both, and what does that do your speculation about the legitimacy of a SWAT team being present at the June 2003 search?

That’s the problem with smearing someone – whether Bob Lazar or the government agencies he dealt with – it distracts you. It makes it easy to jump to conclusions and not only believe the urban legends but also build speculation upon speculation, assumption upon assumption.

It leads people, like Timmerman, to make ridiculous statements, and it makes people jump to conclusions about them when they do. Do you have a negative view of Timmerman because of this story; is it rational and fair to have that opinion based on one boneheaded tweet? What about Balko and his error? What about CPSC, and I’m not talking about simply what’s in this story? What about the people lined up against CPSC on various issues?

Maybe it’s good that this urban legend about CPSC led straight down to bizarre depths. It helps make the risks of such tales clearer. So much of what makes us afraid and angry is just fnord that – by design or by accident – is tricking our monkey brains into thinking the troop is threatened.

While I was working on this story, in May, the 25th anniversary of Lazar’s first Area 51 interviews occurred. KLAS, which originally aired them in 1989, made a big deal out of it, including extended new interviews with Lazar. If you’re interested in such things, you can see lots of segments here.

Something struck me when I watched a bit of the coverage. Lazar says – and comes across as sincere – that he wishes all the attention for bizarre things would just go away; indeed, that he wishes he never waded into any of it in the first place. Of all the credible and incredible elements of this story, I find that to be one of the most believable.