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by ShinShinKid » Wed May 15, 2013 2:51 pm
by justdrew » Wed May 15, 2013 2:59 pm
Canadian_watcher wrote:justdrew wrote:sounds like a midwife
anyway, if they were actively spreading mis-information that incites your violence, then yes.
that sounds like a stretch tho - and it's really a convenient one, too - for the government, I mean. If some ordinary citizen were to assassinate a world leader today I don't think the news would stop broadcasting, do you? But I'll bet that the assassination was 'incited' by the policies of the leader which were broadcast to that individual via the regular news. So.. motive for violent acts isn't cut and dried the way you are kind of claiming it is.
by Canadian_watcher » Wed May 15, 2013 3:02 pm
ShinShinKid wrote:Am I reading this right? We can blame the victims for their own murder? Does a good motive mean we can kill with impunity? Motive must come from within the perpetrator, or there would be no crime, right?
by Canadian_watcher » Wed May 15, 2013 3:08 pm
justdrew wrote:Canadian_watcher wrote:justdrew wrote:sounds like a midwife
anyway, if they were actively spreading mis-information that incites your violence, then yes.
that sounds like a stretch tho - and it's really a convenient one, too - for the government, I mean. If some ordinary citizen were to assassinate a world leader today I don't think the news would stop broadcasting, do you? But I'll bet that the assassination was 'incited' by the policies of the leader which were broadcast to that individual via the regular news. So.. motive for violent acts isn't cut and dried the way you are kind of claiming it is.
I don't think incited means what you think it does. If someone listened to hitler and decided he had to die and killed him, the violence was not "incited" by hitler. On the other hand... if a person listening to hitler decided to go kill a gypsy, that was incited by hitler.
by compared2what? » Wed May 15, 2013 4:52 pm
Canadian_watcher wrote:compared2what? wrote:
There was one recent extremely heightened police action. But at this point, it's not even a fad, let alone a trend.
you should look into this a bit more. How is it that I know about a handful of recent ones and you don't know about any? I'm not being faceitious, I'm just asking you to ask yourself that question, because the answer might be that you keep getting your 'what's important and how to interpret it' stories from the same places every single day, and they might not bother to let you know about that stuff.
In fact that would be a fantastic YouTube channel comedy schtick: "Welcome to What's Important Today with our Special Segment on How to Interpret it for maximum Peaceful Sleep."
compared2what? wrote:But if they have a front-row-seat reason to think it's imminent, I'd say they have an urgent public obligation to stop yammering about the Boer War and share it, pronto, so that people can do something about it besides wait for trained, armed militias that aren't answerable to anyone to enforce the law as they see fit, martially.
If they were to do so I can GUARANTEE that no one on this board (minus a few exceptions, not you though) would even consider that they might be right for one second. Not one cold second - it'd immediately be about how it's a right wing plot to destroy Obama.
compared2what? wrote: Which is the option they seem to me to be declaring a preference for. If they were objecting to any of the real, presently ongoing, longstanding and common abuses of power committed by the police and military -- such as rape, torture and murder -- I'd be with them.
I'm going to look into this if I have time and see what their stand is on other issues such as these that you have mentioned. I want to stress that Oath Keepers and Martial Law have about as much to do with each other as Neighbourhood Watch and rings of drug dealers, so I would really rather not keep up an endless debate about it. You don't like them, you consider them to be dangerous.. I guess I'd ask whether or not you think their organization should be declared as such by the government.. do you?
compared2what? wrote:Yes. But as I just said, they're not objecting to any of those, They're objecting to the prospect of future events that might resemble the Boer War. Also, Obama hasn't loosely planned or threatened to bomb the shit out of Egypt, Syria or Iran. And he got out of Iraq. Which leaves Libya, etc. etc., I admit. But he didn't loosely plan or threaten there, either. He just did it.
A. Boer War - learned about it in grade 6. will have to look back at it as you are clearly getting at something here but unless it's just to mention repeatedly a war which I'd be shocked if 99% of Americans had ever heard of in order to try and demonstrate that the Oathkeepers are obsessed with ancient history, then I don't get it.
B. Whatever - your president is bombing the shit out of countries and killing innocent people by proxy. So was my leader. Big difference between how you operate and how I operate: I wouldn't stoop to glib semantics to defend mine. I don't defend mine whatsoever because he's a world class douche in ever sense of the word, but that's another story.
compared2what? wrote:
I don't disagree that they're a menace. But I don't see the architecture for a coup being laid down there, wrt political and economic self-sufficiency. If there was a coup that instituted martial law, they'd contract with the leaders of that.
I'm not saying they're going to institute martial law, I'm saying that they might just be moving towards taking over the government in a manner that is covert, a la Gladio, but endgame type scenario. the money is there, the will to power is there, the dupes are there, the people are divided, they have weapons, they have infrastructure, they might very well have double agents and if someone wanted it badly enough I don't see what would stop them (except maybe if the real military and police refused to carry out illegal orders)
yessiree.thanks for the debate though, seriously. I love this kind of back and forth.
by conniption » Thu Jul 11, 2013 5:19 am
wsws
American democracy in shambles
22 April 2013
With the imposition of a state of siege in Boston, a historical threshold has been crossed. For the first time ever, a major American city has been placed under the equivalent of martial law. The already frayed veneer of a stable democracy based on constitutional principles is in shreds.
On Monday, April 15, two bombs exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon in the city’s center. Three people were killed and over 170 were injured, some seriously. This was a criminal act with tragic consequences. But violence, including acts of mass homicide and disasters resulting in major loss of life, is a regular feature of American society. Even as the events in Boston were unfolding, a factory explosion in Texas, to all appearances linked to safety hazards, took far more lives than the bombs detonated at the end of the marathon.
There is no precedent for the massive mobilization of military, police and intelligence forces carried out April 19 in Boston and its environs, which encompass more than 1 million people. Thousands of heavily armed police and National Guard troops occupied the streets, backed up by machine gun-mounted armored vehicles, Humvees and Black Hawk helicopters. As the WSWS noted, the scene resembled the US occupation of Baghdad.
The people were told to remain indoors while police, with automatic weapons drawn, conducted warrantless house-to-house searches. Some of those who strayed out of doors were surrounded by police and ordered to go home. The mass transit system was shut down; passenger train service along the northeastern corridor was halted; businesses, universities and other public facilities were closed.
Boston—the cradle of the American Revolution, one of the most liberal cities in one of the most liberal states in the US, the country’s premier center of higher education—was turned into an armed camp. This staggering mobilization of federal, state and local police power was deployed to track down a 19-year-old youth.
So far, there has been no protest from within the political or media establishment to the lockdown.
Following the capture of alleged bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, President Obama issued a late-night statement from the White House in which he stressed the role of his administration in the police-state mobilization, boasting that he had “directed the full resources of the federal government…to increase security as needed.” Ignoring the presumption of innocence, he referred to the captured suspect and his dead brother as “these terrorists.”
Obama’s Justice Department quickly announced that it would not read the suspect his “Miranda right” to remain silent and obtain legal counsel before speaking to police investigators. It would instead question the seriously injured youth “extensively” not just on matters related directly to public safety, but more broadly on “intelligence matters.” This sets a precedent for denying these rights to anyone arrested under antiterrorism statutes, which, under Obama, has already included political dissidents such as Occupy Wall Street and anti-NATO protesters.
Encouraged by the police-military mobilization, Republican senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain and New York Congressman Peter King, all of whom have close ties to the military and intelligence agencies, demanded that Tsarnaev be declared an enemy combatant and turned over to the military.
The events in Boston have laid bare the modus operandi for the establishment of dictatorial forms of rule in the US. One or another violent act carried out by disoriented or disaffected individuals, perhaps with the help of elements within the state, is declared a terrorist event. A state of siege is imposed suspending democratic rights and establishing military-police control.
So deeply implicated are all of the organs of the state in these plans that little in the outer trappings of political life would have to be changed. It would not be necessary to overthrow the president or shut down Congress. These institutions would readily play their assigned role, and the imposition of a military dictatorship would be sanctioned by the US Supreme Court.
The media would simply continue to do what it normally does—functioning as a de facto arm of the state and providing the necessary pretexts, while whipping up the requisite fear and panic within the public.
The very fact that the entire establishment agrees that democratic norms cannot be maintained in the face of violence by a handful of people testifies to the advanced stage of the breakdown of American democracy.
So disproportionate was the scale of the response to the actual level of the threat that the conclusion cannot be avoided that the Boston bombings were the pretext for, not the cause of, the lockdown. The police-state mobilization was the culmination of more than a decade of intensive planning and the ceaseless buildup of the repressive forces of the state since 9/11, carried out under the cover of the “war on terror.”
The operation is not an expression of strength or confidence on the part of the American ruling class. On the contrary, it reflects the near panic of the corporate-financial elite in the face of mounting social discontent, exacerbated by extreme nervousness over the precarious state of global financial markets. What haunts the ruling class is not the fear of a terrorist attack, but dread of a new financial collapse, with the likely consequence of massive social upheavals.
The breakdown of American democracy has profound causes, the first of which is the staggering level of social inequality. Democracy cannot be maintained when the richest 5 percent of the population controls over 60 percent of the wealth. In the moves to police-military dictatorship, the forms of rule are coming into conformance with the underlying social reality of American capitalism.
Another fundamental cause of the crisis of democracy is the eruption of US militarism. The power of the military/intelligence apparatus has grown immensely, particularly since the end of the Soviet Union, as the American ruling class has turned to military aggression as a means of offsetting the decline in its global economic position. The professional military, segregated from society at large and hostile to it, has acquired ever-greater influence over political affairs and civilian authority. As always, imperialist war is incompatible with democracy.
American liberalism as a distinct political tendency has ceased to exist. The lining up of the Democratic Party behind the “war on terror,” and the external aggression and internal repression carried out in its name, has made clear that there is no section of the ruling elite that will defend democratic rights. The Obama administration, which has expanded the right-wing, antidemocratic policies of the Bush administration, is without question the most reactionary in US history.
As always, the filthiest role is played by the media and its leading personnel. From day one, they turned the airwaves into a continual rumor mill, making one unsubstantiated claim after another in an effort to sow fear and panic and justify the police-state measures being taken. They readily agreed to self-censor their reports in accordance with the demands of the police agencies. As CNN anchor Chris Cuomo, son of the former Democratic governor of New York and brother of the state’s current governor, told viewers, “We’ve only been showing the feeds that authorities are comfortable with.”
The media seeks to create an aura of popular support for martial law-type measures. But the initial confusion will give way to mounting disquiet. The abrupt shift in the forms of rule will create opposition in the population, above all in the working class.
The appropriate conclusions need to be drawn. Social inequality and war—the inevitable outcome of capitalism—are incompatible with democracy. One or the other—capitalism or democracy—must go. That is the issue confronting the working class.
Barry Grey
wsws
The New York Times and the state of siege in Boston
By David Brown and Barry Grey
25 April 2013
The New York Times published an editorial Monday that not only endorses last week’s police-military lockdown of Boston, but suggests that it was entirely consistent with democratic procedures. In “How to Handle a Terrorism Case,” the Times makes the absurd argument that the operation that led to the arrest of alleged Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was a vindication of “the fundamental rights that distinguish this country from authoritarian regimes.”
continued
wsws
The Boston lockdown and the Bill of Rights
By Tom Carter
25 April 2013
With the implementation of a state of military siege against the population of Boston last week, the American ruling class has crossed a historical, legal and political Rubicon. The die is cast and the sun is setting on the democratic forms of rule that have existed in the United States for the past two centuries.
continued
wsws
Nation magazine, ISO silent on Boston lockdown
By Tom Mackaman and Barry Grey
30 April 2013
The Nation magazine and the International Socialist Organization’s SocialistWorker.org web site have responded with indifference to the police-military lockdown of Boston imposed during the manhunt for the suspects in the April 15 Boston Marathon bombings.
The action, carried out with the backing of the Obama administration and in conjunction with state and local authorities, was tantamount to the imposition of a state of siege on a major American city. There is no precedent for the mobilization of thousands of National Guard troops, riot police, SWAT teams, machine-gun mounted armored vehicles, military helicopters and attack dogs that was employed to close down Boston and a number of suburbs, with residents told to “shelter in place” while armed officers carried out warrentless house-to-house searches.
As the World Socialist Web Site explained in its April 22 statement, American democracy in shambles, “The events in Boston have laid bare the modus operandi for the establishment of dictatorial forms of rule in the US. One or another violent act carried out by disoriented or disaffected individuals, perhaps with the help of elements within the state, is declared a terrorist event. A state of siege is imposed suspending democratic rights and establishment military-police control.
“So deeply implicated are all of the organs of the state in these plans that little in the outer trappings of political life would have to be changed.”
No less indicative of the collapse of American democracy than the events themselves is the virtual absence of any criticism of the police state mobilization from any section of the political or media establishment. In this, as in the prosecution of imperialist wars in Libya and Syria and the relentless assault on the living conditions of the working class, the supposedly “left” elements around and within the Democratic Party and the trade union bureaucracy that form the constituency of the Nation and the ISO take their cue from the ruling class.
One searches the TheNation.com and SocialistWorker.org in vain for an article addressing—much less condemning—the police-military lockdown. Nor do these publications seriously examine the host of questions that point to the involvement of state agencies, in one or another form, in the bombings.
The complacency is palpable. Nation writer Richard Parker, who lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, one of the towns occupied by police and troops on April 19, notes in “After Boston: The Banality of Shock and Sentiment” (April 22), that the Tsarnaev brothers lived “just two blocks from the hockey rink where my sons have skated for more than a decade.” Parker was “dismayed” by the media coverage and the official reaction, but fails to even mention the city’s lockdown—an event that can hardly be described as “banal.”
Lead immigration writer Aura Bogado on April 22 affected a posture of supreme concern over “how this will play out for communities of color in the short run and in the long run.” (“Let's Not Normalize This Thing Called 'Terrorism': A Conversation with Sohail Daulatzai”). But three days later, on April 25, Bogado was far less alarmed, complaining that Republican senators were using the Boston bombing as “an unfortunate distraction” standing in the way of the Obama administration’s immigration “reform” (“No, Chuck Grassley, the Tsarnaev Brothers Were Not in the Shadows”).
Several articles on TheNation.org speculate on the ramifications for US-Russian relations, given the family background of the two suspects in former-Soviet Central Asia. These are written from the standpoint of offering foreign policy advice to the Obama administration, and include three articles by lead foreign policy writer Robert Dreyfuss: “The US, Russia and Chechnya After Boston” (April 22), “The Chechen-Dagestan Connection to Boston” (April 23), “Wanted: US-Russia Deal on Syria” (April 24). There is also Thomas Goltz’s “Is There a Chechen Connection to the Boston Bombings?” (April 24). None of these articles refers to the threat to democratic rights posed by the Obama administration’s lockdown.
The closest TheNation.org comes to warning of the grave implications of the imposition of virtual martial law conditions comes from sports writer Dave Zirin—but from the standpoint of concern over whether he will be able to enjoy the Boston Marathon next year. (“Why We Must Protect Next Year’s Boston Marathon From Ourselves,” April 20). Zirin cross posts his articles on SocialistWorker.org.
It is not that the editors and writers of TheNation.org are unaware. We find near the end of Tom Engelhard’s 3,000 word retrospective, “The Long March of Jeremy Scahill's 'Dirty Wars,'” the following paragraph:
“Almost unnoticed, imperial wars also have a way of coming home. Take the reaction to the Boston marathon bombings. The response was certainly the largest, most militarized manhunt in American history… An eighty-seven-square-mile metropolitan area was almost totally locked down… It was a spectacle that would have been unimaginable in pre-9/11 America.”
Unimaginable in pre-9/11 America, but accepted without protest by the Nation in 2013. Such is the collapse of American liberalism.
SocialistWorker.org is even more crude in its attempts to obscure the fundamental class and historical issues underlying the Boston lockdown and inject racial politics into the events surrounding the bombings. Not accidentally, its articles barely mention President Obama.
Headlines on SocialistWorker.org exhibit these pseudo-socialists’ obsession with race and indifference to the specter of dictatorship: “Through the media's prejudiced lens” (April 17), “A Fog of Prejudices” (April 24), “Balanced between Solidarity and Racism” (April 19), and “The Tide of Islamophobia” (April 23). SocialistWorker.org also reposted a number of previously published articles touching on such subjects as “hate.”
The only article that might appear to address the threat posed to democracy is Nicole Colson’s April 22 “Don't let them use fear to lock down our rights.” The article makes mention of the suspension of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s Miranda rights, but makes no reference to the lockdown of Boston, the house-to-house searches, etc.
The article’s primary concern is “the racist assumptions about ‘terrorism’ that simmer below the surface in the US media and political establishment.” Presumably, if these “racist assumptions” could simply be washed away, a new flowering of democracy would follow.
Typical of SocialistWorker.org’s coverage is the editorial comment by leading ISO figure Alan Maass, “A fog of prejudices,” which appeared on April 24. Maass discusses at length “the revival of anti-Islam myths and lies,” but in 2,700 words finds no space to mention the police-military occupation of Boston.
An April 25 editorial entitled “State of fear” likewise fails to mention the lockdown. But it includes one paragraph that gives expression to the politically diseased fixation of the ISO on race and its conviction that the American working class is racist.
“Last week,” the authors write, “after one suspect in the Marathon bombings was killed and another captured, the media focused on official encouraged celebrations of Boston residents— very, very white from the looks of them —who embraced the media- and politically generated patriotic fervor and racist message against Muslims.” [Emphasis added].
The silence of the ISO on the police state exercise in Boston and the role of the Obama administration in escalating preparations for dictatorial forms of rule is not an aberration. After the New York Times published a lengthy article last May describing in detail President Obama’s personal role in ordering drone assassinations around the world, the ISO did not publish a single article on the subject for weeks. (See: “ISO silent on Obama’s kill list”).
Again, when a secret US Justice Department memo came to light on February 4 of this year asserting the right of the president to order the assassination of American citizens, the ISO failed to comment for more than a week. When the ISO does write on such issues, it does so in a manner calculated to conceal the underlying social and political issues. There is in its commentary no reference to the staggering growth of social inequality in America that is the single most important factor in the breakdown of democratic processes.
The ISO seeks to divert attention from the basic class conflict that is at the heart of the crisis of American democracy, precisely because it raises revolutionary questions and the need for a struggle by the working class against the Democratic Party and its allies in the trade union apparatus, both of which the ISO support and into which it has been integrated.
Nor does the ISO in any serious way connect the assault on democratic rights at home with the escalation of American militarism and war abroad. How could it, when it supports the neo-colonial wars waged by the Obama administration in Libya and Syria and has become a partisan of imperialist war carried out in the name of “human rights?”
The complacency and indifference to the threat of dictatorship of the Nation and the ISO, and the entire pseudo-left social-political milieu that they represent, is an expression of the protracted rightward evolution of ex-left elements rooted in privileged layers of the middle class. With the intensification of the crisis of American and world capitalism, the immense sharpening of antagonisms between the major classes, and the growth of social discontent presaging the eruption of great class battles, the upper-middle class layers that once dominated the “left” in the United States—and internationally—have moved into the camp of imperialism and social reaction.
While this is seen today most sharply in their support for imperialist crimes abroad, their visceral hostility and fear of the working class already finds expression in paralysis and adaptation to the moves by the ruling class to impose new, authoritarian forms of rule. It will increasingly emerge in the form of open support for state repression against mass struggles by the working class.
by conniption » Thu Jul 25, 2013 4:08 pm
wsws
The militarization of America
Bill Van Auken
25 July 2013
This week’s deployment of Blackhawk helicopters in Chicago is only the latest in a series of “urban warfare training” exercises that have become a familiar feature of American life.
As elsewhere, this exercise was sprung unannounced on a startled civilian population. Conducted in secrecy, apparently with the collusion of local police agencies and elected officials, Democrats and Republicans alike, the ostensible purpose of these exercises is to give US troops experience in what Pentagon doctrine refers to as “Military Operations on Urban Terrain.”
Such operations are unquestionably of central importance to the US military. Over the past decade, its primary mission, as evidenced in Afghanistan and Iraq, has been the invasion and occupation of relatively powerless countries and the subjugation of their resisting populations, often in house-to-house fighting in urban centers.
The Army operates a 1,000 acre Urban Training Center in south-central Indiana that boasts over 1,500 “training structures” designed to simulate houses, schools, hospitals and factories. The center’s web site states that it “can be tailored to replicate both foreign and domestic scenarios.”
What does flying Blackhawks low over Chicago apartment buildings or rolling armored military convoys through the streets of St. Louis accomplish that cannot be achieved through the sprawling training center’s simulations? Last year alone, there were at least seven such exercises, including in Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, Tampa, St. Louis, Minneapolis and Creeds, Virginia.
The most obvious answer is that these exercises accustom troops to operating in US cities, while desensitizing the American people to the domestic deployment of US military might.
Preparations for such deployments are already far advanced. Over the past decade, under the pretext of prosecuting a “global war on terror,” Washington has enacted a raft of repressive legislation and created a vast new bureaucracy of state control under the Department of Homeland Security. Under the Obama administration, the White House has claimed the power to throw enemies of the state into indefinite military detention or even assassinate them on US soil by means of drone strikes, while radically expanding electronic spying on the American population.
Part of this process has been the ceaseless growth of the power of the US military and its increasing intervention into domestic affairs. In 2002, the creation of the US Northern Command for the first time dedicated a military command to operations within the US itself.
Just last May, the Pentagon announced the implementation of new rules of engagement for US military forces operating on American soil to provide “support” to “civilian law enforcement authorities, including responses to civil disturbances.”
The document declares sweeping and unprecedented military powers under a section entitled “Emergency Authority.” It asserts the authority of a “federal military commander” in “extraordinary emergency circumstances where prior authorization by the president is impossible and duly constituted local authorities are unable to control the situation, to engage temporarily in activities that are necessary to quell large-scale, unexpected civil disturbances.” In other words, the Pentagon brass claims the unilateral authority to impose martial law.
These powers are not being asserted for the purpose of defending the US population against terrorism or to counter some hypothetical emergency. The US military command is quite conscious of where the danger lies.
In a recent article, a senior instructor at the Fort Leavenworth Command and General Staff College and former director of the Army’s School of Advanced Military Studies laid out a telling scenario for a situation in which the military could intervene.
“The Great Recession of the early twenty-first century lasts far longer than anyone anticipated. After a change in control of the White House and Congress in 2012, the governing party cuts off all funding that had been dedicated to boosting the economy or toward relief. The United States economy has flatlined, much like Japan’s in the 1990s, for the better part of a decade. By 2016, the economy shows signs of reawakening, but the middle and lower-middle classes have yet to experience much in the way of job growth or pay raises. Unemployment continues to hover perilously close to double digits …”
In other words, the Pentagon sees these conditions—which differ little from what exists in the US today—producing social upheavals that can be quelled only by means of military force.
What is being upended, behind the scenes and with virtually no media coverage, much less public debate, are constitutional principles dating back centuries that bar the use of the military in civilian law enforcement. In the Declaration of Independence itself, the indictment justifying revolution against King George included the charge that he had “affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.”
Side by side with the rising domestic power of the military, the supposedly civilian police have been militarized. An article published by the Wall Street Journal last weekend entitled “The Rise of the Warrior Cop” graphically described this process:
“Driven by martial rhetoric and the availability of military-style equipment—from bayonets and M-16 rifles to armored personnel carriers—American police forces have often adopted a mind-set previously reserved for the battlefield. The war on drugs and, more recently, post-9/11 antiterrorism efforts have created a new figure on the US scene: the warrior cop—armed to the teeth, ready to deal harshly with targeted wrongdoers, and a growing threat to familiar American liberties.”
The article describes the vast proliferation of SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) units to virtually every town in America, fueled by some $35 billion in grants from the Department of Homeland Security, “with much of the money going to purchase military gear such as armored personnel carriers.”
This armed force was on full display in April when what amounted to a state of siege was imposed on the city of Boston, ostensibly to capture one teenage suspect. The entire population of a major American city was locked in their homes as combat-equipped police, virtually indistinguishable from troops, occupied the streets and conducted warrantless house-to-house searches.
Underlying this unprecedented militarization of US society are two parallel processes. The immense widening of the social chasm separating the billionaires and multi-millionaires who control economic and political life from American working people, the great majority of the population, is fundamentally incompatible with democracy and requires other forms of rule. At the same time, the turn to militarism as the principal instrument of US foreign policy has vastly increased the power of the military within the US state apparatus.
Both America’s ruling oligarchy and the Pentagon command recognize that profound social polarization and deepening economic crisis must give rise to social upheavals. They are preparing accordingly.
The working class must draw the appropriate conclusions and make its own political preparations for the inevitable confrontations to come.
by conniption » Sun Dec 15, 2013 9:00 pm
Axis of Logic
(embedded links at the source.)
The Criminalization of Everyday Life
By Chase Madar
Tom Dispatch via Mother Jones
Friday, Dec 13, 2013
Editor's Comment: We are indebted to Attorney Chase Madar for his thorough research and analysis in this well-written article on the rise of the police state in the U.S.His many citations lead the reader to a fuller appreciation of how utterly pervasive the law and police have become in our daily lives. Madar's treatise shows how this is especially true for Muslims, Latinos, Afrrican Americans, all persons of color and poor-whites - but also increasingly so among school children and all people in the working and middle classes. It also raises questions about why and how, "a state ... harasses and imprisons its own people while shouting ever less intelligibly about freedom." Is it a phenomenon that somehow just developed out of modern political and social conditions, taking on a life of its own - or is it a conscious strategy that's been applied by the state to intimidate, oppress ... and control dissent?
- Les Blough, EditorAxis of Logic
From the workplace to our private lives, American society is starting to resemble a police state.
If all you've got is a hammer, then everything starts to look like a nail. And if police and prosecutors are your only tool, sooner or later everything and everyone will be treated as criminal. This is increasingly the American way of life, a path that involves "solving" social problems (and even some non-problems) by throwing cops at them, with generally disastrous results. Wall-to-wall criminal law encroaches ever more on everyday life as police power is applied in ways that would have been unthinkable just a generation ago.
By now, the militarization of the police has advanced to the point where "the War on Crime" and "the War on Drugs" are no longer metaphors but bland understatements. There is the proliferation of heavily armed SWAT teams, even in small towns; the use of shock-and-awe tactics to bust small-time bookies; the no-knock raids to recover trace amounts of drugs that often result in the killing of family dogs, if not family members; and in communities where drug treatment programs once were key, the waging of a drug version of counterinsurgency war. (All of this is ably reported on journalist Radley Balko's blog and in his book, The Rise of the Warrior Cop.) But American over-policing involves far more than the widely reported up-armoring of your local precinct. It's also the way police power has entered the DNA of social policy, turning just about every sphere of American life into a police matter.
The School-to-Prison Pipeline
It starts in our schools, where discipline is increasingly outsourced to police personnel. What not long ago would have been seen as normal childhood misbehavior—doodling on a desk, farting in class, a kindergartener's tantrum—can leave a kid in handcuffs, removed from school, or even booked at the local precinct. Such "criminals" can be as young as seven-year-old Wilson Reyes, a New Yorker who was handcuffed and interrogated under suspicion of stealing five dollars from a classmate. (Turned out he didn't do it.)
Though it's a national phenomenon, Mississippi currently leads the way in turning school behavior into a police issue. The Hospitality State has imposed felony charges on schoolchildren for "crimes" like throwing peanuts on a bus. Wearing the wrong color belt to school got one child handcuffed to a railing for several hours. All of this goes under the rubric of "zero-tolerance" discipline, which turns out to be just another form of violence legally imported into schools.
Despite a long-term drop in youth crime, the carceral style of education remains in style. Metal detectors—a horrible way for any child to start the day—are installed in ever more schools, even those with sterling disciplinary records, despite the demonstrable fact that such scanners provide no guarantee against shootings and stabbings.
Every school shooting, whether in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, or Littleton, Colorado, only leads to more police in schools and more arms as well. It's the one thing the National Rifle Association and Democratic senators can agree on. There are plenty of successful ways to run an orderly school without criminalizing the classroom, but politicians and much of the media don't seem to want to know about them. The "school-to-prison pipeline," a jargon term coined by activists, is entering the vernacular.
Go to Jail, Do Not Pass Go
Even as simple a matter as getting yourself from point A to point B can quickly become a law enforcement matter as travel and public space are ever more aggressively policed. Waiting for a bus? Such loitering just got three Rochester youths arrested. Driving without a seat belt can easily escalate into an arrest, even if the driver is a state judge. (Notably, all four of these men were black.) If the police think you might be carrying drugs, warrantless body cavity searches at the nearest hospital may be in the offing—you will be sent the bill later.
Air travel entails increasingly intimate pat-downs and arbitrary rules that many experts see as nothing more than "security theater." As for staying at home, it carries its own risks as Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates found out when a Cambridge police officer mistook him for a burglar and hauled him away—a case that is hardly unique.
Overcriminalization at Work
Office and retail work might seem like an unpromising growth area for police and prosecutors, but criminal law has found its way into the white-collar workplace, too. Just ask Georgia Thompson, a Wisconsin state employee targeted by a federal prosecutor for the "crime" of incorrectly processing a travel agency's bid for state business. She spent four months in a federal prison before being sprung by a federal court. Or Judy Wilkinson, hauled away in handcuffs by an undercover cop for serving mimosas without a license to the customers in her bridal shop. Or George Norris, sentenced to 17 months in prison for selling orchids without the proper paperwork to an undercover federal agent.
Increasingly, basic economic transactions are being policed under the purview of criminal law. In Arkansas, for instance, Human Rights Watch reports that a new law funnels delinquent (or allegedly delinquent) rental tenants directly to the criminal courts, where failure to pay up can result in quick arrest and incarceration, even though debtor's prison as an institution was supposed to have ended in the nineteenth century.
And the mood is spreading. Take the asset bubble collapse of 2008 and the rising cries of progressives for the criminal prosecution of Wall Street perpetrators, as if a fundamentally sound financial system had been abused by a small number of criminals who were running free after the debacle. Instead of pushing a debate about how to restructure our predatory financial system, liberals in their focus on individual prosecution are aping the punitive zeal of the authoritarians. A few high-profile prosecutions for insider trading (which had nothing to do with the last crash) have, of course, not changed Wall Street one bit.
Criminalizing Immigration
The past decade has also seen immigration policy ingested by criminal law. According to another Human Rights Watch report—their US division is increasingly busy—federal criminal prosecutions of immigrants for illegal entry have surged from 3,000 in 2002 to 48,000 last year. This novel application of police and prosecutors has broken up families and fueled the expansion of for-profit detention centers, even as it has failed to show any stronger deterrent effect on immigration than the civil law system that preceded it. Thanks to Arizona's SB 1070 bill, police in that state are now licensed to stop and check the papers of anyone suspected of being undocumented—that is, who looks Latino.
Meanwhile, significant parts of the US-Mexico border are now militarized (as increasingly is the Canadian border), including what seem to resemble free-fire zones. And if anyone were to leave bottled water for migrants illegally crossing the desert and in danger of death from dehydration, that good Samaritan should expect to face criminal charges, too. Intensified policing with aggressive targets for arrests and deportations are guaranteed to be a part of any future bipartisan deal on immigration reform.
Digital Over-Policing
As for the Internet, for a time it was terra nova and so relatively free of a steroidal law enforcement presence. Not anymore. The late Aaron Swartz, a young Internet genius and activist affiliated with Harvard University, was caught downloading masses of scholarly articles (all publicly subsidized) from an open network on the MIT campus. Swartz was federally prosecuted under the capacious Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for violating a "terms and services agreement"—a transgression that anyone who has ever disabled a cookie on his or her laptop has also, technically, committed. Swartz committed suicide earlier this year while facing a possible 50-year sentence and up to a million dollars in fines.
Since the summer, thanks to whistleblowing contractor Edward Snowden, we have learned a great deal about the way the NSA stops and frisks our (and apparently everyone else's) digital communications, both email and telephonic. The security benefits of such indiscriminate policing are far from clear, despite the government's emphatic but inconsistent assurances otherwise. What comes into sharper focus with every volley of new revelations is the emerging digital infrastructure of what can only be called a police state.
Sex Police
Sex is another zone of police overkill in our post-Puritan land. Getting put on a sex offender registry is alarmingly easy—as has been done to children as young as 11 for "playing doctor" with a relative, again according to Human Rights Watch. But getting taken off the registry later is extraordinarily difficult. Across the nation, sex offender registries have expanded massively, especially in California, where one in every 380 adults is now a registered sex offender, creating a new pariah class with severe obstacles to employment, housing, or any kind of community life. The proper penalty for, say, an 18-year-old who has sex with a 14-year-old can be debated, but should that 18-year-old's life really be ruined forever?
Equality Before the Cops?
It will surprise no one that Americans are not all treated equally by the police. Law enforcement picks on kids more than adults, the queer more than straight, Muslims more than Methodists—Muslims a lot more than than Methodists—antiwar activists more than the apolitical. Above all, our punitive state targets the poor more than the wealthy and Blacks and Latinos more than white people.
A case in point: after the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School, a police presence, including surveillance cameras and metal detectors, was ratcheted up at schools around the country, particularly in urban areas with largely working-class black and Latino student bodies. It was all to "protect" the kids, of course. At Columbine itself, however, no metal detector was installed and no heavy police presence intruded. The reason was simple. At that school in the Colorado suburb of Littleton, the mostly well-heeled white families did not want their kids treated like potential felons, and they had the status and political power to get their way. But communities without such clout are less able to push back against the encroachments of police power.
Even Our Prisons Are Over-Policed
The over-criminalization of American life empties out into our vast, overcrowded prison system, which is itself over-policed. The ultimate form of punitive control (and torture) is long-term solitary confinement, in which 80,000 to 100,000 prisoners are encased at any given moment. Is this really necessary? Solitary is no longer reserved for the worst or the worst or most dangerous prisoners but can be inflicted on ones who wear Rastafari dreadlocks, have a copy of Sun Tzu's Art of War in their cell, or are in any way suspected, no matter how tenuous the grounds, of gang affiliations.
Not every developed nation does things this way. Some 30 years ago, Great Britain shifted from isolating prisoners to, whenever possible, giving them greater responsibility and autonomy—with less violent results. But don't even bring the subject up here. It will fall on deaf ears.
Extreme policing is exacerbated by extreme sentencing. For instance, more than 3,000 Americans have been sentenced to life terms without chance of parole for nonviolent offenses. These are mostly but not exclusively drug offenses, including life for a pound of cocaine that a boyfriend stashed in the attic; selling LSD at a Grateful Dead concert; and shoplifting three belts from a department store.
Our incarceration rate is the highest in the world, triple that of the now-defunct East Germany. The incarceration rate for African American men is about five times higher than that of the Soviet Union at the peak of the gulag.
The Destruction of Families
Prison may seem the logical finale for this litany of over-criminalization, but the story doesn't actually end with those inmates. As prisons warehouse ever more Americans, often hundreds of miles from their local communities, family bonds weaken and disintegrate. In addition, once a parent goes into the criminal justice system, his or her family tends to end up on the radar screens of state agencies. "Being under surveillance by law enforcement makes a family much more vulnerable to Child Protective Services," says Professor Dorothy Roberts of the University of Pennsylvania Law school. An incarcerated parent, especially an incarcerated mother, means a much stronger likelihood that children will be sent into foster care, where, according to one recent study, they will be twice as likely as war veterans to suffer from PTSD.
In New York State, the Administration for Child Services and the juvenile justice system recently merged, effectively putting thousands of children in a heavily policed, penalty-based environment until they age out. "Being in foster care makes you much more vulnerable to being picked up by the juvenile justice system," says Roberts. "If you're in a group home and you get in a fight, that could easily become a police matter." In every respect, the creeping over-criminalization of everyday life exerts a corrosive effect on American families.
Do We Live in a Police State?
The term "police state" was once brushed off by mainstream intellectuals as the hyperbole of paranoids. Not so much anymore. Even in the tweediest precincts of the legal system, the over-criminalization of American life is remarked upon with greater frequency and intensity. "You're probably a (federal) criminal" is the accusatory title of a widely read essay co-authored by Judge Alex Kozinski of the 9th Circuit of the US Court of Appeals. A Republican appointee, Kozinski surveys the morass of criminal laws that make virtually every American an easy target for law enforcement. Veteran defense lawyer Harvey Silverglate has written an entire book about how an average American professional could easily commit three felonies in a single day without knowing it.
The daily overkill of police power in the US goes a long way toward explaining why more Americans aren't outraged by the "excesses" of the war on terror, which, as one law professor has argued, are just our everyday domestic penal habits exported to more exotic venues. It is no less true that the growth of domestic police power is, in this positive feedback loop, the partial result of our distant foreign wars seeping back into the homeland (the "imperial boomerang" that Hannah Arendt warned against).
Many who have long railed against our country's everyday police overkill have reacted to the revelations of NSA surveillance with detectable exasperation: of course we are over-policed! Some have even responded with peevish resentment: Why so much sympathy for this Snowden kid when the daily grind of our justice system destroys so many lives without comment or scandal? After all, in New York, the police department's "stop and frisk" tactic, which targets African American and Latino working-class youth for routinized street searches, was until recently uncontroversial among the political and opinion-making class. If "the gloves came off" after September 11, 2001, many Americans were surprised to learn they had ever been on to begin with.
A hammer is necessary to any toolkit. But you don't use a hammer to turn a screw, chop a tomato, or brush your teeth. And yet the hammer remains our instrument of choice, both in the conduct of our foreign policy and in our domestic order. The result is not peace, justice, or prosperity but rather a state that harasses and imprisons its own people while shouting ever less intelligibly about freedom.
Chase Madar is an attorney, a TomDispatch regular, and the author of The Passion of [Chelsea] Manning: The Story behind the Wikileaks Whistleblower. Chase tweets @ChMadar.
Source: Tom Dispatch via Mother Jones
5 comments
Uncle Jack
• 2 days ago
In the meantime in North Korea............!!
Les, with your infinite wisdom and knowledge, please complete the sentence!!
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Paul Richard Harris Mod Uncle Jack
• 5 hours ago
Sorry I'm late to the party, guys. Crappy weather here needed to be shovelled. A lot.
"In the meantime in North Korea ... life continues to suck." I think most people would agree they'd rather not live in North Korea under the current regime.
But, Jack, you make the common error of saying someone else is worse, therefore we're okay. No country deserves a free pass because its crimes don't add up to someone else's. But to complain of one injustice and ignore the far bloodier one isn't just odd; it's a clear statement that those at the helm of criticizing PNK hate PNK more than they hate oppression itself. Yes there is oppression in PNK. And there is a police state in the US. Why is one better than the other?
The whole point of this article appears to have escaped you.
Paul
PS. Don't know about Les learning Arabic; but he does know some Farsi ... probably picked it up on one of his clandestine assignations abroad.
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Les Blough Mod Uncle Jack
• a day ago
I'm glad you're still with us in Bayt al-Hikma, Jack. Keep reading Axis of Logic and who knows, maybe some of it will seep in.
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Uncle Jack Les Blough
• a day ago
Hey Les,
Learning Arabic at your old age home??
Moving to Syria soon???
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Les Blough Mod Uncle Jack
• a day ago
I've already been here in Damascus for three weeks now, Jack - under a clandestine Venezuela-Syria defense program. The Assad government put me through a 2 week training program, taught me a few basics in Arabic, enough to get by - along with training on the AK-47, I'll be heading off to help defend Allepo with my platoon tomorow. Smiling at you smilin' Jack - don't get too old too fast - bad for your health.
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by seemslikeadream » Sun Dec 15, 2013 9:43 pm
Boston PD's new assault rifles raise concern over militarization of police
by Daniel Lovering @daniellovering December 15, 2013 2:30PM ET
Saying it has to keep up in arms race with street criminals, department will put AR-15 rifles in patrol cars
Topics: U.S. Law & Justice Boston
Boston police are looking toward assault weapons to keep up with street criminals.Jared Wickerham/Getty Images
BOSTON — Standing several blocks from the scene of a recent shooting in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood, Tariq Nazyat recalled the days when gun violence in the area was far worse than it is today. And he would know: He once carried a gun and shot someone before being sent to prison.
“I’ve been shot, I’ve been stabbed,” said Nazyat, 39, now a machinist and father who credited “good people” with helping him turn his life around. “That was that life back then. I was scared.”
But gun violence in the neighborhood has declined sharply since his teenage years, so he was puzzled by Boston Police Department plans to buy about 30 military-style semiautomatic rifles and train nearly 100 patrol officers to use them.
“Everybody’s seen shootings, but not like before,” said Nazyat, who wore a black Boston Celtics baseball hat and matching jacket, referring to Roxbury residents.
An AR-15 rifle.
An AR-15 rifle. Joe Raedle/Getty Images
The plans to deploy the powerful weapons have triggered a major debate in New England’s largest city. On the one hand, many residents, especially in neighborhoods dominated by minorities, worry about a creeping militarization of their local police force, fearing that deploying such rifles on the streets could create more dangers than they solve. Some security analysts agree, seeing the move as part of a larger shift toward the militarization of police departments that has been happening in the rest of Massachusetts and across the country.
But on the other hand, the police and their supporters see a real need to combat often heavily armed criminals and prepare for terrorist threats, as in the case of the city’s recently targeted marathon. Police say they need the guns to do their jobs effectively and protect the city and its people.
Boston Police superintendent Kenneth Fong said police “routinely” seize semiautomatic assault rifles from the streets. They need the high-powered AR-15-style rifles, he said, to contend with “active shooter-type situations” and suspects who may be clad in body armor, heavily armed or beyond the range of handguns.
“The city and the world we live in now is different than in years past,” he said, “and we need to have equipment to meet the threat that we’re facing now.”
Planned before bombings
On April 15 — when two bombs exploded at the Boston Marathon, killing three people and injuring more than 260 — the plan to buy the rifles was already in the works. But the attack and its aftermath, including an extensive manhunt by heavily armed police, highlighted “a situation where we didn’t have a sufficient number of officers properly equipped,” Fong said.
Edward Davis, who recently stepped down as the city’s police commissioner, proposed the idea in 2007.
“There was some hesitance to move forward with it at that time,” Davis told Al Jazeera. “I think that it’s appropriate that it’s starting back up again.”
Two years later, Boston police ordered about 200 semiautomatic M16s from the U.S. military under a federal surplus program and planned to distribute them to neighborhood officers before Mayor Thomas Menino thwarted the plan, the Boston Globe reported at the time. But some 82 police departments elsewhere in Massachusetts, many facing little or no violent crime but fearing terrorist attacks, have obtained more than 1,000 such weapons.
All of a sudden the department seems to be rushing into this. It isn’t like this is Fallujah or we’re in a war zone.
Jack Kervin
president of the Boston police union
Menino, who will leave office at the end of year, has pressed for stricter gun legislation in Massachusetts. He was “well aware” that such rifles were common in other jurisdictions, and he “will continue to advocate for the limited use of these weapons for routine work,” Menino’s spokesman John Guilfoil said in an email to Al Jazeera.
“The mayor made clear that he doesn’t expect these types of weapons to be used regularly but rather stored securely in police vehicles and used only during necessary emergency situations,” Guilfoil added.
Even within the Boston Police Department, some officers favored an expansion of the current model of deploying tactical vehicles and trained specialists rather than arming ordinary patrol officers with semiautomatic rifles.
“All of a sudden the department seems to be rushing into this,” said Jack Kervin, president of the Boston Police Superior Officers Federation labor union. “It isn’t like this is Fallujah or we’re in a war zone.”
‘Standard police weapon’?
Under the current plan, the department expects to equip two officers in each of the city’s 11 districts with the long-range AR-15 rifles, which would be kept in cruisers, Fong said.
The weapons would add to the firepower of a department that has four to eight specially trained officers who patrol the city in so-called tactical vehicles, each equipped with an M4 rifle and a shotgun.
“Mainly it’s to give officers facing suspects armed with heavy weapons the ability to be able to respond to them,” Fong said.
The AR-15 has become “a standard police weapon,” said Robert Cottrol, a professor at George Washington University Law School.
“Not that every police car has one, but most police departments have a stock of them, so if there is a situation that calls for it, you can call for people with AR-15s,” Cottrol said. “That’s fairly common, and I think that makes perfect sense.”
Ladd Everitt, director of communications for the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, an advocacy group based in Washington, D.C., said police need the guns because they were facing similarly armed suspects on the streets.
“We’re seeing more police arming themselves up with assault rifles, essentially battlefield rifles, and it’s sad,” he said. “It’s the escalation of violence between essentially law enforcement and the average civilian.”
Some analysts fear such weapons could be used routinely. Although they may have been bought for extraordinary circumstances, “suddenly after a few years we find them being incorporated into drug raids, which happen on a more regular basis,” said Tim Lynch, criminal-justice project director at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.
“The most disturbing repercussion that we see happening is when officers are dressing up in military garb, camouflage uniforms, military boots and helmets, and now you put M16s in their hands, there’s just a subtle change in their whole mentality when it comes to policing,” he said. “They begin to view the people in the community as adversaries, as the enemy, instead of people who have constitutional rights.”
He cited violent no-knock raids by police and the use of flash-bang grenades, among other tactics, often undertaken without preliminary investigation, he said.
“It’s just a recipe for unnecessary violence and unnecessary injuries and sometimes the loss of life,” Lynch said. “The idea that your average patrolman in the neighborhood is going to be attacked by someone with an AK-47 — that’s just speculative fears rather than real evidence of them being outgunned.”
Paramilitarization of police
In Massachusetts, shootings have increased in Boston in recent months but remain far lower than they were in the early 1990s. The state has among the lowest rates of gun-related deaths in the country and some of the nation’s toughest gun laws, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association. Most shootings are committed with handguns.
Kade Crockford, director of the Technology for Liberty Project at the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, said the move reflects a trend nationwide that includes the “paramilitarization of the police” and the federalization of local and state police departments.
She referred to fusion centers established by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that conduct surveillance and are run by state and local police but staffed by National Guard, military, FBI and other federal personnel, with access to real-time surveillance feeds and public and private databases.
“Do we want police officers who are sent out into our streets to be trained as if — and equipped as if — the people they encounter on their patrols are enemy hostile targets, as if in a war?” she said. “Or do we want them to see people in our communities as allies and people they are meant to protect and serve?”
On the street in Roxbury, Tariq Nazyat disputed the assertion that police were routinely confiscating assault rifles, saying most young people with guns in the neighborhood probably had 40-year-old Browning pistols.
“What do you need an AR-15 for?” he asked. “We’re in the middle of the city. If you open that gun up in the middle of the city, chances are somebody’s going to get hurt. I don’t really think you should be in that line of work if you even have that type of mentality.”
by conniption » Mon Sep 08, 2014 8:59 pm
Truth and Shadows
(embedded links)
Why Ferguson, Boston bombing, OKC, and 9/11 are part of the same plan for domestic control
August 20, 2014
Ferguson as war zone 7
By Craig McKee
The sight of police in camouflage uniforms with assault rifles, grenade launchers, and mine-resistant armored vehicles advancing on protesters in Ferguson, Missouri has shocked a lot of people.
But it shouldn’t have.
Those paying attention know that law enforcement across America has been undergoing a transformation over the past two decades with the process accelerating noticeably since 9/11. This is thanks to the Pentagon and its “1033 program” (section 1033 of the National Defense Authorization Act), which allows it to transfer surplus military equipment to law enforcement agencies across the country.
The result is police forces being turned into small armies, officers into soldiers, and citizens into potential enemy combatants. The emphasis is no longer on protecting and serving – it’s now about controlling and intimidating. Meanwhile, dozens of movies and television shows in recent years have depicted this new style of law enforcement as being absolutely normal. Viewers, as a result, are coming to see it that way, too. And they see the continuing of this trend as being inevitable.
With the shooting of unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown by police in Ferguson on August 9, the mainstream debate over the transfer of greater and greater firepower to police has finally begun. Is the outrage enough to make people demand a rollback of the advancing police state, or is this conflict just another step in the ongoing process?
With the continuing protests in Ferguson, the militarization of police has become so obvious that even the mainstream media are catching on. The New York Times, Newsweek, CNN, and many other major media are now openly covering the question of whether there is any justification for turning police services – often in small towns – into paramilitary units that possess mine-resistant armored vehicles, helicopters, grenade launchers, assault rifles, bulletproof vests, night vision equipment, and various other sorts of battle gear.
According to the New York Times: “The increase in military-style equipment has coincided with a significant rise in the number of police SWAT teams, which are increasingly being used for routine duties such as conducting liquor inspections and serving warrants.”
Newsweek adds: “By providing law enforcement agencies with surplus military equipment free of charge, the NDAA encourages police to employ military weapons and military tactics.”
In this video, a 68-year-old grandmother and her 18-year-old adopted daughter are traumatized by a raid that had to do with pirating of their wi-fi signal by someone else to make threatening statements. Police smashed the front door glass of their home, fired in a flash grenade and proceeded to handcuff and terrorize the two innocent people.
The media coverage of the events in Ferguson has looked at whether the equipment transfer policy should be “reviewed,” if not halted, but it has not looked deeper. It has not looked at why these transfers are taking place in the first place. Why would the Pentagon want police forces to become just like armies? Is it that they want us to see law enforcement power differently? Is it that they want us to see ourselves differently – no longer the people who employ police to protect them but now the people who are to be ruled by those police? Or is it even more practical and sinister – that militarized police can be enlisted to help impose a wider martial law?
The raid against the woman and her daughter isn’t an isolated incident. It’s happening every day across the country. And it isn’t happening in a vacuum. It’s part of a long-term plan to control the population through disinformation, deception, fear, and force. In the bigger picture, this plan incorporates government-backed false flag operations like the Oklahoma City bombing, the 9/11 “attacks,” and the Boston Marathon bombing.
These “terror” events, and numerous others like them, were designed to create a false threat that would encourage people to accept the tightening fist of the police state. The elites who really run things are constructing this police state in ways that include the militarization of police as well as the increasing use of technology for surveillance and data gathering. The media occasionally raise mild “concerns” about this but do little else.
What is hard to understand is why people are alarmed to see the “military” police presence in Ferguson when they didn’t appear concerned 16 months ago when complete martial law was imposed in the Boston area. In that case, a city was shut down, businesses were forced to close, people were restricted to their homes, and police were allowed to go door to door, forcing the residents outside at gunpoint and searching their homes without warrants.
And all this was done as part of a search for 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who has been accused of planting and detonating two bombs near the finish line of the Marathon. But the case made by authorities that he and his brother (now dead) were behind the bombings is paper thin and flatly contradicted by significant evidence.
This example of martial law in Boston was greeted with patriotic enthusiasm by many across the country who wanted to feel “Boston strong.” This happened at the very time when Constitutional rights were being suspended in response to what was clearly a staged, false flag operation designed to put us all more at ease with the coming police state. The young Dzhokhar was caught, of course, while the question of whether martial law was justified was ignored by most.
The notion of “home-grown terrorism” was brought into the spotlight with the bombing of Oklahoma City City’s Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in 1995. While CIA operative Timothy McVeigh and his friend Terry Nichols got the blame, we know that the destruction of the building did not result from the explosives in the truck that McVeigh parked outside. Instead, it resulted from explosives planted inside the building. It was taken for granted that McVeigh and Nichols had carried out the bombing alone and that they did so because they had an anti-government agenda (certain government pronouncements in the years since have equated those who challenge the government with “terrorists”).
And, of course, the climate of fear that has accelerated the country’s transformation into a police state was magnified many times by the biggest false flag operation in U.S. history – 9/11. This event was falsely portrayed as a terrorist attack by Muslim extremists under the command of Osama bin Laden (a CIA asset). But thanks to thousands of independent researchers and citizen activists, the lies of the official story of 9/11 are becoming better known each year. No thanks are due to the authorities or the mainstream media.
The evidence that the twin towers and Building 7 were brought down with explosives is conclusive. It is also clear that both the Pentagon and Shanksville, PA were the scenes of faked plane crashes and that no actual hijackings ever took place.
This massive psy-op, which I believe was many years in the planning, was very effective in raising the threat level, justifying any number of repressive measures that were essential for the advancement of the police state. The induced fear of terrorism that resulted from 9/11 has been the “accelerant” in this process of manipulating the population into surrendering its civil liberties.
9/11 led to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the passage of the Patriot Act, and the intensification of a massive program of domestic surveillance by the National Security Agency. It also made possible the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, the drone bombing of civilians in Pakistan and Yemen, the full-scale bombing of Libya and ensuing regime change, and the arming of rebels in Syria.
Police and their new toys
The process of remaking law enforcement has been ongoing for more than 20 years now. The National Defense Authorization Act was passed in 1990, and section 1208 of the law allowed the Department of Defense to transfer material to federal and state police forces – supposedly to help them fight the “war on drugs.” In 1996, this section of the law was replaced with Section 1033 and the scope of the program was broadened.
We are told that this program is intended to transfer “excess” or “surplus” equipment from the military to police forces. It’s just extra stuff that would be going to waste if police forces didn’t take it off the military’s hands, we’re told. The cost so far: $4.3 billion. (“Oops, we goofed! Once again, we ordered too many anti-mine armored tanks, night vision goggles, and grenade launchers! But our incompetence means great savings for you!”)
The result has been the absurd spectacle of towns with just a few thousand residents having tanks at their disposal. Police in Bloomingon, Georgia, for example, picked up four grenade launchers thanks to the 1033 program. They have a population of 2,713. And in Watertown, Connecticut, with a population 22,514, police recently acquired a mine-resistant, ambush-protected (MRAP) vehicle with a price tag of $733,000.
In fact, the New York Times published a map of the U.S. showing which counties had received military equipment since 1994. A quick glance shows that the vast majority of the country has received some of this “surplus” equipment.
All over America, we’re seeing that when you treat and equip police like they’re part of an invading army, then they’ll act accordingly. In the days following the Michael Brown shooting we have seen this equipment put to very enthusiastic use. Verbal threats have been made against residents and journalists, tear gas and rubber bullets fired at people in their own yards, a midnight curfew imposed, and restrictions enacted on the rights of assembly and free speech.
We saw police firing tear gas at an al-Jazeera TV crew. When the journalists backed off to escape the gas, police moved in and began dismantling their lighting set up and taking down their camera. Apparently in police state America it is now a privilege to film on public streets – in fact a privilege to be on those streets at all.
We also saw the arrest of journalists from the Washington Post and the Huffington Post in a McDonald’s. Apparently they did not clear out quickly enough. Another journalist was threatened by an officer with being shot if he didn’t turn his camera off while another walked down the street pointing his rifle at unarmed individuals, including one cameraman who was told, “I’m going to fucking kill you!” Now that cop was probably scared himself, but in that case he should not be carrying a rifle at all. Then there’s the Tuesday night arrest of Canadian journalist Tom Walters of CTV. Walters approached Capt. Ron Johnson and asked a question only to be wrestled to the ground and arrested. He was held overnight and released without charge.
But it’s not the behavior of individual cops that is central to why all of this is happening. What is important is that a police state infrastructure is being built and deployed, with the process seeming to advance more quickly with each passing year. It appears that people are being asked to accept that they now live under an increasingly “military” type of occupation and that an iron fist can come crashing down on them at any time whether they’ve done anything wrong or not.
193 comments
by RocketMan » Wed Jul 22, 2015 1:18 pm
Retired US Army General Wesley Clark called for the internment of persons deemed “disloyal” to the United States government in an interview with MSNBC last Friday.
Warning of the threat posed by “lone wolf” attacks similar to last week’s mass shooting in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Clark advocated stepped-up surveillance of US communities and pre-emptive detention of persons suspected of ideological or political opposition to US government policies.
“We have got to identify the people who are most likely to be radicalized. We’ve got to cut this off at the beginning,” Clark said.
“On a national policy level, we need to look at what self-radicalization means, because we are at war with this group of terrorists,” the former top military commander added. “They do have an ideology. In World War II, if someone supported Nazi Germany at the expense of the United States, we didn’t say that was freedom of speech, we put him in a camp, they were prisoners of war.”
He continued: “If these people are radicalized and they don’t support the United States and they are disloyal to the United States, as a matter of principle, fine. It’s their right, and it’s our right and obligation to segregate them from the normal community for the duration of the conflict.
“And I think we’re going to have to increasingly get tough on this, not only in the United States, but our allied nations like Britain, Germany and France are going to have to look at their domestic law procedures.”
Clark’s recommendations, proclaimed openly on national television, amount to a recipe for mass detention of political opponents of the American state.
His assertion of the “right and obligation” of the US government to conduct round-ups and mass internment operations against political opposition, specifically citing as his model the methods employed against ethnic Germans and Japanese during the Second World War, provides a chilling insight into the thinking of powerful sections of the US ruling establishment.
[...]
[....]
Clark, America’s most prominent political general, was speaking not just for himself, but for powerful layers within the US military/intelligence apparatus and ruling oligarchy who fear the growth of social opposition and are preparing to defend their interests, no matter what the cost.
The event that prompted Clark’s televised remarks was the recent killing of four Marines and one sailor at an armed forces recruiting center in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Clark’s proposal for mass internment was advanced as a response to the so-called “self radicalized,” “lone wolf” phenomenon—labels that have been applied to a handful of terrorist incidents over the course of more than a decade. The vast majority of such “lone wolf” incidents have involved hapless and, in some cases, mentally disturbed individuals who were set up by FBI and police agent provocateurs.
If Clark’s proposal were implemented, such “sting” operations and subsequent frame-up trials could be dispensed with, as the “self-radicalized” were identified by their thoughts, statements or Internet postings and summarily thrown into concentration camps.
The scale of his proposed response is so disproportionate to the actual threat—which has claimed far fewer victims than mass shootings carried out by individuals who have shown no sign of being “radicalized”—that it is impossible not to conclude that there are deeper and hidden motives and processes at work.
[...]
by Luther Blissett » Tue Jul 28, 2015 12:12 pm
by conniption » Fri Sep 04, 2015 5:55 pm
21st Century Wire
(embedded links)
(slightly edited)
‘G.I. Joe’ Shooting: Massive Multi-Agency, Martial Law Drill Underway in Fox Lake, Illinois (PHOTOS)
September 2, 2015 By 21wire
58 Comments
DAILY SHOOTER
21st Century Wire
As staged multi-agency drills go, they don’t come much bigger than this one.
This afternoon a mass manhunt was underway by law enforcement in Fox Lake, Illinois to find suspects following the shooting of a local police officer, fatally shot while in pursuit of the three men on Tuesday morning.
We’re told that the downed officer was lieutenant, Charles Joseph ‘G.I. Joe’ Gliniewicz, 52, a 30-year veteran with the Fox Lake Police Department. We’re also told that he was a married father of four. A loss such as this would certainly be a tragedy for this small community.
“This should never happen. Joey just loved his job,” said Thomas Poulos, a retired Waukegan police officer who says he went to high school with Gliniewicz in Antioch, Illinois.
It’ has not yet been explained why his nickname is ‘G.I. Joe’, but Gliniewicz appears to sport a ‘military’ look in including a cropped Marine-style haircut, so one might also only assume that he carried a similar persona while policing.
At a brief staged news conference in the morning, authorities announced they were searching for two white men and one black man. No other details were given, and police even admitted they had “no other information” about the three alleged suspects. Regardless, this did not seem to stop law enforcement and the mainstream media from quickly gearing-up for one of the largest manhunts TV productions staged so far this year in the United States.
Did this shooting really happen the way police claim it happened on Tuesday morning, and are there really three suspects at large? Time will tell what is fact and what is fiction in this case, but one thing is certain: whether real or fake, both the federalized police ‘fusion’ apparatus and the corporatized mainstream media have been a bit too enthusiastic in staging this enormous production – one of the biggest mechanized police state exhibitions we’ve seen to date – all to contain a threat which appears to be marginal at best.
Martial Law Imposed on Tuesday
Within 90 minutes, a large perimeter “envelope” was set up and Martial Law was essentially put into place throughout Fox Lake. Local schools were put on “lock-down” and all 10,000 residents of Fox Lake were quickly ordered to “Shelter In Place” by the authorities – for the entire day. Teams of heavily armed police with semi-automatic assault rifles, dressed in body armor and full tactical gear then began conducting house-to-house searches claiming they were looking for the three suspects.
Police made sure a select few of these house searches were filmed from designated helicopters overhead, and while watching the coverage of the house searches, it was obvious that police house raids were being choreographed for the TV – so police on the ground were being directed according to where the overhead film crews were positioned – to capture the best possible shots of their militarized operation. As expected, CNN continually praised the police, remarking how ‘dangerous’ the situation was and about, “The potential for them [suspects] going into a family house and taking hostages.”
MRAPs carrying armed tactical units conduct house-to-house searches in Fox Lake today.
The following local, state and federal agencies were all scrambled and put on high alert (for what otherwise would be just another incident involving a policeman and alleged perpetrators):
At least 300 armed officers and support agents (that we know of) from the FBI, ATF, U.S. Marshals Service, Illinois State Police, Fox Lake Police Dept., County Sheriff’s Dept., multiple SWAT teams (Sheriff, ATF, FBI and other counties), 40 K9 sniffer dogs, specialist ‘Anti-Terror’ units, private security contractors, multiple police forces from nearby towns and counties, EMS and two local Fire Departments.
OVERKILL: Federalized sniper were positioned on top of local homes, even though suspects had long fled the area by car.
Of the hundreds of armed agents that were dispatched, many included snipers and police ‘infantry’ dressed in camouflage, taking up sniper positions on nearby bridges, highway overpasses, and on the roofs of residential homes, as well as hiding in positions in the surrounding wooded areas.
SWAT FEST: An endless bevy of shooter team were paraded in front of news cameras all day at Fox Lake.
Why the FBI, or any federal agency could pretend to claim ANY federal jurisdiction over an alleged crime scene such as this one in Fox Lake is anybody’s guess, and one can only assume that this was a staged drill, otherwise, the FBI, the ATF and the US Marshals service would not even be there. Who is in charge? Is it the local Sheriff, or the federal special agents? This question also has constitutional ramifications.
Again, despite all these resources being deployed, the police were said to have absolutely NO information about who the suspects were, where they were, or what they looked like, other than they were two white and one black male.
FEDERAL TOYS: Fox Lake drill was also a giant advertising campaign for makers of the expensive ‘policing’ equipment, paid for with lavish federal grants (legal bribes).
MORE FEDERAL TOYS: Local law enforcement showing more expensive gear purchased with ‘free’ Federal grant money.
In addition to hundreds of officers and federal agents the following hardware was also deployed:
After reviewing all of today’s reports, we count at least 6 ‘Winnebago’-style mobile command centers, at least 20 armored black combat Humvees, 12 armored MRAPs combat transport vehicles, multiple helicopters with snipers on board, airplanes, drones and at least 50 other additional SUVs – which congregated at two main ‘forward operating bases’ that were set-up in the town. Columns of armored Humvees could be seen on TV from the air, positioned along the roads every 100 meters in formation you would typically see in an US Army convoy in an overseas war theater like Iraq. Clearly, these vehicles being positioned for the overhead camera shot, with armed commandos marching in formation along the adjacent railroad tracks.
How can local law enforcement afford $1 million fully equipped Winnebagos and fleets of Humvees and MRAPs? Answer: through federal grants doled out via federal agencies like the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Critics believe that the DHS has assembled a centralized ‘Standing Army’ on US soil. After analyzing this week’s drill in Fox Lake, you might say they are correct.
IRAQ STYLE: Humvees positioned for the camera to create an impressive ‘show of force’.
By 3pm EDT, the Federal Aviation Administration announced that a ‘No-Fly Zone’ was now in effect over 2 square nautical miles above the scene. More than anything, this over-the-top move by the federal government indicates that Tuesday’s event was a full-spectrum drill, because there would be absolutely no reason to ban overhead flights, unless of course that law enforcement didn’t want anyone other than ‘embedded media’ cameras peering in on this unprecedented domestic drill.
Finally, 4pm rolls and still no sign (not surprisingly) of the alleged suspects. CNN and FOX pundits continue to worship the operation, and quickly begin salivating over the possibility of a “night-time manhunt”, possibly involving a squadron of police helicopters fitted with infrared and thermal imaging equipment.
Even though police have absolutely no idea if the alleged suspects still remain in the area, police crow proudly that an additional 100 specialist sniper and camouflaged marksmen will work alongside sniffer K9 teams “throughout the night” to hunt the suspects in the woods.
‘Police State Pageantry’
What was on display Tuesday had very little to do with catching armed suspects. A multimillion dollar manhunt was launched before an investigation took place, leaving TV viewers with an elaborately staged production for the benefit of national broadcasters.
If this was a genuine policing operation, then there would be two fairly obvious problems (but not obvious to mindless news anchors at CNN and FOX News). Firstly, when officer Gliniewicz was discovered, he had already been stripped of his gun and other gear – including his police radio. Given the battery life of that TETRA radio unit of up to 8 hours, the alleged suspects would have been able to listen to the police communications in the area.
Secondly, although reporters attempted to act coy about police movements and search locations in the late afternoon, the media still announced loud and proud about the size of the perimeter of “10 square miles”, and the approximate locations of the search earlier in the day. If the alleged assailants had any brains whatsoever (and judging by the fact that they took the police radio from the officer – they did have some brains), then they would have simply exited the general vicinity to avoid being caught in the state’s multi-million dollar elaborate dragnet.
LOOKING TOUGH: Many federal contractors were paid as high as $1,000 or more per day, to participate in this week’s Fox Lake DHS drill. Who is picking up the bill (take a wild guess)
What is not reported by either CNN or FOX News, is that many of the participants in Tuesday’s multi-agency drill were not full-time employees of the participating agencies, but rather, they were ‘freelance’ contractors hired through ‘approved’ security recruitment consultants. Many of these contractors would be from out-of-state, and are regularly paid in excess of $1,000 per day or more, plus expenses – in order to take part in this type of drill. The bill for Tuesday and Wednesday’s drill at Fox Lake increases by the minute, and by the time it’s finished, it could easily reach in excess of $5 million. Who will pick up the tab? Take a wild guess.
CNN and media outlets have not bothered to question the effectiveness of this massive overkill multi-agency military operation. Early reports confirm that the fallen officer had approached the alleged suspects while they were with their vehicle. Gliniewicz reportedly approached the three suspects near Route 12 and Sayton Road in Fox Lake. Clearly, police DO NOT know what vehicle they were driving, otherwise the make and model of the vehicle would have been released to the public (if it hasn’t, then this would signal a major departure from normal best practices). Common sense dictates that the three suspects simply got back into their vehicle… and drove away. This option has never been mentioned by the media, which is yet another reason to believe that today’s elaborate production is a staged event.
Regardless, mindless media commentators, especially from CNN, keep repeating the “see something, say something” mantra, encouraging more learned helplessness in the face of an obviously stage-managed media event.
If this were a normal crime scene, then police would first analyze CCTV camera footage from the nearby Walgreens pharmacy store, along with any other visual evidence, as well as forensic tire tread and other physical artifacts, before working through normal detective and investigative protocols to an idea of where the suspects might be. Instead, they did it the other way around. What left is a stage set for a Hollywood blockbuster film, or a reenactment of the 4th Infantry Division marching on Baghdad.
The entire operation today is conservatively estimated as costing in the millions of dollars.
NASHVILLE: Overwhelming response non event with no injuries or casualties. Hundreds of agents and officers spent the day posing in front of cameras and socializing in a shopping mall parking lot, with EMS personnel pretending to look busy moving things back and forth for TV shots (Photo Washington Post)
Bedfellows: Fusion and Overkill
Earlier this summer, the US mainstream media went into overkill mode over the entire month of June covering the great ‘New York Prison Break’, where prisoners David Sweat and Richard Matt escaped from the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, upper state New York. What followed was an endless stream of police press conferences, interviews with security experts, law enforcement people, and endless gushing by the media and talking heads over the eternal glowing “… coordination between local, state and federal law enforcement agencies”, as well as, “the urgent need for increased funding to upgrade our aging prisons and prevent these type of escapes from happening again.”
Tuesday’s domestic DHS multi-agency “fusion” operation in Fox Lake mirrored another recent overkill event which was on public display during the militarized build-up during a staged drill that took place on Wednesday August 5, 2015, in the town of Antioch outside of Nashville, Tennessee. Police claimed that the Nashville event was because of a lone gunman who was spotted in a small theater. In the end, over 150 local, state and federal agency and EMS personnel were scrambled to the near empty suburban theater, even though the gunman did not injure anyone. Police claimed to have shot and killed the gunman, even though no evidence has been presented to verify the identity of the alleged gunman at the scene.
Like with most other major “active shooter drills”, coverage was mostly unremarkable, with scenes of hundreds of agents standing around, huddled together in small groups, socializing, talking and playing with their cell phones.
Last October, a similar ‘officer-involved shooting’ also took place in the nearby town of Holiday Hills, some 12 miles away from Fox Lake. That event also prompted a massive manhunt for US military veteran, Scott B. Peters, 52, who apparently shot and wounded three McHenry County sheriff’s deputies when they approached his door following what police describe as responding to a “domestic dispute”. Following his apprehension, Peters was then give an unusual $1 million bail by the court. Rather oddly, the Sheriff declined to state why the alleged “domestic situation” began which originally prompted the call-out in the first place. Peters was eventually sentenced to 135 years in prison.
“ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE” TOWN PARTY: Fox Lake Mayor Donny Schmit gets ready for Venetian Night during a recent fundraiser with one of the zombies who will be at the Aug. 1 event. (Village of Fox Lake / Handout)
Social Engineering: Dominant Themes
There are three dominant social engineering, political and psychological themes that have emerged from this multi-agency drill. Each one plugs directly into the left vs. right political dialectic. They are as follows:
1. ‘Open Season on Cops’ (Decried by the Right).
Keen to conjure a new threat to national security, reactionary right-wing media outlets like FOX News repeatedly insisted throughout the day that today’s incident in Fox Lake, Illinois was part of a new ‘war on police’, even though there is no evidence to support this sensational claim. The same sensational, baseless claim was made over the weekend when a Sheriff’s deputy was shot and killed in Harris County, Texas. Because the suspect in this case was black, both the Sheriff and FOX News proceeded to push the talking point that activists from the Black Lives Matter movement were responsible for the shooting. Not content to quit there, FOX News and other reactionary right-wing talk radio hosts like Michael Savage also claimed that a Monday night shooting of a police officer in Atlanta, Georgia was also part of the mythical ‘war on police’ in America – even though there is no evidence to support the wild claim. Authorities admit that the Atlanta policeman was shot after confused officers responded to a call about a suspicious person – and showed up at the wrong house.
2. Federalization of Police (Sometimes decried by the Left, and occasionally by the Right).
What Fox Lake and Nashville demonstrate is that there is no more separation of jurisdiction when it comes to federal, state and local law enforcement in America. Far from protecting the US from al-Qaeda, the true function of the behemoth Department of Homeland Security is precisely this – to ‘fuse’ together all domestic law enforcement and data collection agencies in order to format a 21st century Police State. This new mechanized police trend is normally decried by the Left-wing, #BlackLivesMatter and Occupy – even though this policy is being pushed even harder by the current Democratic Party-controlled White House. Left-wing liberals normally overlook the dangers of a federalized police force because they automatically assume (at least during a Democratic administration) that anything coming out of Washington must be better. Right-wing pundits generally overlook the federalization trend due to blind love for seeing shiny military hardware and soldiers in camo on the streets of America (it reminds them of Iraq) and police snipers wearing Ghillie suits and cops in body armor, parading in front of TV cameras.
3. ‘Shock and Awe’.
This message is crystal clear. The federal government will spare no expense and will deploy the full force of its resources if it feels like it, regardless of how poorly thought out or effective that operation might be. Even for something relatively obscure. “We’ll show America our new toys, and don’t forget – we’re spending your money.” Sounds a bit like how Washington routinely operates overseas too. Surprised?
Earlier this year, President Barack Obama announced his plan for a federal takeover of state and local policing. Right-wing pundits will seize on this as “proof” that this is solely a ‘Obama agenda’ while ignoring the fact that this final federalization step would not have been possible without the DHS transformation decreed under George W. Bush in the Orwellian shadow of 9/11. In truth, it’s an agenda which BOTH parties are actively pursuing.
Federalists will claim that putting all law enforcement under one umbrella will ensure a more streamlined, professional police forced without corruption. This theory is fatally flawed, and history proves that federal agencies entertain corruption on a much higher level, and also use federal agencies to settle political scores (remember the IRS scandal?). One can also argue that keeping policing in the hands of diverse state and local authorities will help to limit the potential for abuse. Regarding federalized police in the US, writer Glenn Harlan Reynolds comments:
“The idea behind federal supervision of local police forces is that it will make them more accountable. Instead of a bunch of presumptively racist, violent hicks running things on a local level, we’ll see the cool professionalism of the national government in charge. There are (at least) two problems with this approach. The first is that federal law enforcement, especially in recent years, hasn’t exactly been a haven of cool professionalism. The second is that no law enforcement agency is very good at policing itself, meaning that a national police force is likely to be less accountable, not more.”
He adds, “These police agencies aren’t very good at policing themselves. But at least there’s the possibility that other police agencies might investigate them more thoroughly. The Secret Service agents in Nashville who requested their phony warrant were busted by the local police chief; the Baltimore police will be investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice. But unify all these police agencies under one umbrella and they’ll do what guilty bureaucrats tend to do — hide the evidence, then investigate themselves and proclaim themselves blameless.”
APOCALYPSE NOW: War-style photos have been circulated throughout US news agencies today.
What Next?
It will interesting to see what the narrative develops into on Wednesday after a full night of man hunt drills in Fox Lake. Will the media take the bait again ala New York and help conjure-up another nationwide man-hunt? Will it suddenly become an ‘ISIS-inspired’ attack?
One thing is certain: today has been one giant advertisement for the manufacturers of police and military hardware. by Thursday, the mainstream media will have forgotten about Fox Lake, just as they have already forgotten about the Virginia TV News Shooting event. On to the next mass shooting event! Such is the curious, albeit outlandish nature of The Daily Shooter.
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READ MORE DAILY SHOOTER NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire Daily Shooter Files
by seemslikeadream » Mon Sep 14, 2015 9:34 am
US War Theories Target Dissenters
by Todd E. Pierce, September 14, 2015
When the U.S. Department of Defense published a new Law of War Manual (LOW) this past summer, editorialists at the New York Times sat up and took notice. Their concern was that the manual stated that journalists could be deemed “unprivileged belligerents.” The editorial explained that as a legal term “that applies to fighters that are afforded fewer protections than the declared combatants in a war.” In fact, it is far more insidious than that innocuous description.
Here is the manual’s definition: “‘Unlawful combatants’ or ‘unprivileged belligerents’ are persons who, by engaging in hostilities, have incurred one or more of the corresponding liabilities of combatant status (e.g., being made the object of attack and subject to detention), but who are not entitled to any of the distinct privileges of combatant status (e.g., combatant immunity and POW status).”
The key phrase here is “being made the object of attack.” For slow-witted New York Times editorialists, that means journalists can be killed as can any enemy soldier in wartime. “Subject to detention” means a journalist deemed an unprivileged belligerent will be put into military detention if captured. As with any enemy belligerent, however, if “capture is not feasible,” they would be killed if possible, by drone perhaps if in a foreign country.
Currently, most U.S. captives deemed “unprivileged belligerents” are imprisoned in Guantanamo although some may be held in Afghanistan. It must be noted that the United States deems as an “unprivileged belligerent” anyone they target for capture or choose to kill.
That the New York Times’ concern only arose with publication of the new LOW manual suggests they may have been in a deep sleep since 9/11 as the Department of Defense (DOD) has openly worked to impose limitations on information sharing and news gathering since that event gave them a pretext. It is now a well-established pattern of the U.S. government to suppress rights guaranteed by the First Amendment whenever they can get by with it, as was seen with the New York Times own James Risen.
But the New York Times colluded with the CIA in censoring Risen’s reporting. Furthermore, they seemed to have ignored the U.S. government’s momentous argument of the unlimited power of the President to target journalists and activists for “expressive activities,” as the Department of Justice stated in the case of Hedges v. Obama, as described below.
It has frequently been noted there’s been an ongoing “war” against journalists since 9/11. The new DOD Law of War manual makes that official and potentially takes it to the highest level of conflict. While expressing concern, the Times’ editorialist does not seem to realize or care how ominous it is that the DOD now openly declares that journalists may be deemed “unprivileged belligerents,” unlawful combatants, as the DOD manual provides, instead of hiding the fact in coded language as done since 2001. Inherent to those classifications is that they represent the “enemy” and can be killed by U.S. officials.
That will come as no surprise to those acquainted with the foreign journalists who have been targeted and killed by drones in places such as Pakistan. Nor will it surprise Sami al-Hajj, the Al Jazeera journalist who was held in Guantanamo for years. But now it is clear that the same fate could be in store for U.S. journalists.
That coded language is embedded in the claim by Military Commissions prosecutors and the Justice Department that there is a “U.S. domestic common law of war.” What they claim is entirely based upon martial law orders of the Civil War and the military’s orders to remove Japanese-Americans from the their homes on the West Coast in World War II. All the cases they rely on for a “domestic law of war” today were judicially condemned during or almost immediately after the wars in which they were a part of.
U.S. Domestic Common Law of War
U.S. Military Commissions Chief Prosecutor Brig. General Mark Martins and his staff invented what they call the “U.S. domestic common law of war” in filings to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. That invention consists only of the martial law precedents of the U.S. Civil War and the removal of the Japanese-Americans from the West Coast at the direction of General DeWitt. Both were later seen as examples of military despotism.
The American people have been inured by a deliberate effort of the U.S. military to accept invocation of the law of war as a talisman to permit any act by officials which would have been known as illegal before 9/11. But as the manual states: “Although the law of war is generally viewed as ‘prohibitive law,’ in some respects, especially in the context of domestic law, the law of war may be viewed as permissive or even as a source of authority. For example, the principle of military necessity in the customary law of war may be viewed as justifying or permitting certain acts.” (Emphasis added.)
“Military necessity” was the law of war basis for removal of the Japanese-Americans. Military necessity though indisputably a part of the law of war is a totalitarian precept when applied to a civilian population.
The LOW manual explains the object of war by quoting George H. Aldrich, Deputy Legal Adviser to the U.S. Department of State during the Vietnam War. He wrote of “a general acceptance of the view that modern war is aimed not merely at the enemy’s military forces but at the enemy’s willingness and ability to pursue its war aims. . . . In Viet-Nam political, rather than military, objectives were even more dominant. Both sides had as their goal not the destruction of the other’s military forces but the destruction of the will to continue the struggle.”
The “destruction of the will” of the adversary is always the object of war, according to Clausewitz and adopted by the U.S. military. But this has a totalitarian element to it; the adversary’s reciprocal object is to destroy our will. Consequently, “our” will must be protected by suppressing any dissent which could harm morale and the population’s willingness to “continue the struggle.”
That was the foundational belief underlying martial law during the Civil War. The Constitution was an obstacle again to suppressing dissent to a degree after the Civil War, but with the invention of a U.S. domestic common law of war and legalistic word play, this obstacle has once again been removed as the Justice Department argued in Hedges v. Obama.
The claim of being at war with internal and external enemies is always made by totalitarian states to justify their suppression of speech and a free press through repression. For a brief period in U.S. history, the Civil War, the U.S. military adopted military repression through martial law to suppress any dissent to its war practices.
Martial law was declared throughout the Union States, the North, on Aug. 8, 1862, by Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, at the request of President Abraham Lincoln. Orders were published to “arrest and imprison” any persons “discouraging volunteer enlistments” or “giving aid and comfort to the enemy” or for “any other disloyal practice.” A military commission would try the prisoners, and a second order “suspended” the writ of habeas corpus in their cases.
Martial law was more formally declared on Sept. 24, 1862, by President Lincoln himself in addition to suspending the writ of habeas corpus. Lieber’s Code was then prepared as the order giving effect to martial law. Contrary to how it is presented by the U.S. Army and credulous human rights commentators, Lieber’s Code was primarily a harsh martial law order with Prussian militarist law of war concepts introduced to the U.S. to criminalize any expressions of dissent as “war treason.”
Thus, Col. William Winthrop explained that among the greater number of individuals who were brought to trial before the military commissions during the Civil War, the offenses included “hostile or disloyal acts, or publications or declarations calculated to excite opposition to the federal government or sympathy with the enemy, etc.”
Whiting’s Guidance
Solicitor of the Department of War during the Civil War, William Whiting, gave legal guidance to the Union Commanders for enforcement of martial law. The “guidebook” was his own War Powers of the President. This book could have been used by any militaristic and totalitarian regime, which in fact it was as it was derived from authoritarian principles of martial law from Prussia. Those authoritarian principles remained in force under Prussia’s successor state, Germany, during two world wars, and were the legal basis of the infamous People’s Court which tried “war treason” cases; cases of “disloyal” expressive acts in most cases without more.
The guidance of Whiting was: “No person in loyal States can rightfully be captured or detained unless he has engaged, or there is reasonable cause to believe he intends to engage, in acts of hostility to the United States – that is to say, in acts which may tend to impede or embarrass the United States in such military proceedings as the commander-in-chief may see fit to institute.” This is the same argument that the U.S. government made in Hedges v. Obama.
What constituted an act of hostility? Whiting defines that to include a sentiment of hostility to the government “to undermine confidence in its capacity or its integrity, to diminish, demoralize . . . its armies, to break down confidence in those who are intrusted with its military operations in the field.”
An example of how martial law was to be carried out was in an order to a subordinate commander by the Army Department of the Pacific Commander in response to complaints from the Citizens of Solano County, California, of disloyal “utterances” they were hearing from fellow citizens.
The order read: “The department commander desires you to let the people understand generally that the order of the President suspending the writ of habeas corpus and directing the arrest of all persons guilty of disloyal practices will be rigidly enforced. . . . Practices injurious to the government or offensive to the loyal sentiment of the people will under no circumstances be permitted.”
Immediately after the Civil War, when it was freshest in their minds, the Supreme Court had this to say about martial law in Ex Parte Milligan: “What is ordinarily called martial law is no law at all. Wellington, in one of his despatches from Portugal, in 1810, in his speech on the Ceylon affair, so describes it. Let us call the thing by its right name; it is not martial law, but martial rule. And when we speak of it, let us speak of it as abolishing all law, and substituting the will of the military commander, and we shall give a true idea of the thing, and be able to reason about it with a clear sense of what we are doing.”
Martial law is a subpart of the Law of War and since it is for application to a domestic population as with the Northern States during the Civil War by the Union Army, it is “moderated” ordinarily from the even harsher provisions of the Law of War which are now invoked in the Law of War manual. Yet precepts of both are being introduced domestically with Section 1021 of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act and domestically and globally by the “U.S. domestic common law of war” precedents trumpeted by Chief Military Commissions Prosecutor, Brig. Gen. Mark Martins.
It must be noted that this is not to compare the Union unfavorably with the Confederacy. The Confederacy had the highest form of martial law: slavery. But the Defense Department only uses one legal precedent from the Confederacy today, which is “outlawry.”
Lieber’s Code addressed “outlawry” in Art. 148, which provided, in pertinent part: “The law of war does not allow proclaiming either an individual belonging to the hostile army, or a citizen, or a subject of the hostile government, an outlaw, who may be slain without trial by any captor, . . . on the contrary, it abhors such outrage.”
This was adopted in the Hague Regulations and as interpreted in earlier Army Law of Land Warfare manuals, prohibited assassinations as well as any declarations that an individual or group is outside the protection of the law of war, which is what designation as an unprivileged belligerent does. The prohibition of assassination has also been put aside with the routine practice of assassination with drones today by the U.S. military.
The Confederacy committed the offense of outlawry when its leaders declared all captured African-Americans fighting for the Union were outside the protection of the law of war (which did preexist Lieber’s Code) and would be placed into the indefinite detention of slavery. After 9/11, the U.S. government did the same with the invention of the unlawful combatant/unprivileged belligerent category and indefinite detention at Guantanamo Bay and any other location U.S. officials chose to place “unprivileged belligerents.”
Treason of the Professors and the Media
Ironically, shortly after the New York Times expressed its concern for journalists in early August, the Guardian reported in an article written by William C. Bradford, a recently hired assistant professor in the law department at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. The article, entitled “Trahison des Professeurs: The Critical Law of Armed Conflict Academy as an Islamist Fifth Column,” was published in the National Security Law Journal of George Mason University Law School.
Bradford argued that the U.S. should be more aggressive in attacking Muslims to include attacks which are war crimes under the law of war. But it was his advocacy that the U.S. military attack other “lawful targets” in its war on terrorism, which include “law school facilities, scholars’ home offices and media outlets where they give interviews” that caught the most attention. These civilian areas were all places where a “causal connection between the content disseminated and Islamist crimes incited” exist, according to Bradford.
Furthermore, Bradford wrote, “Shocking and extreme as this option might seem, [dissenting] scholars, and the law schools that employ them, are – at least in theory – targetable so long as attacks are proportional, distinguish noncombatants from combatants, employ nonprohibited weapons, and contribute to the defeat of Islamism.” In other words, dissenting scholars are unprivileged belligerents and subject to attack, just as journalists are according to the Law of War manual.
Not to defend him but Bradford was articulating the underlying logic of the new Law of War manual’s position that dissenting journalists can be targeted as unprivileged belligerents. This, as stated above, is consistent with oppressive extra-constitutional martial law practices which Chief Prosecutor Mark Martins boasts of as “U.S. domestic common law of war.”
One has to ask: where are the supposed watchdogs of the press when military officers can so easily slide historical falsehoods past them in destroying freedom of the press? Further, Bradford argued that law professors who criticized the failure of the U.S. to abide by the Geneva Conventions and the Law of War represented a “treasonous” fifth column that could be attacked as enemy combatants.
If there is treason being committed in the United States, it must be seen in the acts of those reconstituting the extra-constitutional martial law cases of the Civil War period. That is, Brig. Gen. Mark Martins and associated government attorneys who, in effect, are engaged in an indirect coup d’etat of the U.S. Constitutional order. In fact, Bradford was alleged to have written in favor of a direct military coup d’etat as well.
As it turned out, Bradford had other ethical issues than just his incitement to commit war crimes and target law professors. A combination of factors led to his resigning his position at the Military Academy and this individual crisis would seem to have passed.
The home page of the National Security Law Journal in which his essay had been published carried a repudiation of it by the incoming editorial board. They summarized his article as follows: “Mr. Bradford’s contention that some scholars in legal academia could be considered as constituting a fifth column in the war against terror; his interpretation is that those scholars could be targeted as unlawful combatants.”
But substitute “journalists” for “scholars” and you have the position on journalists of the DOD’s new Law of War manual.
An insightful article in The Atlantic asks “how a scholar pushing these ideas seems not to have raised red flags any earlier.” That’s an excellent question. The article was entitled “The Unusual Opinions of William C. Bradford.” But here’s the point; these opinions are not unusual among some members of the military and right-wing law professors such as Adrian Vermeule of Harvard and Eric Posner of the University of Chicago.
Posner and Vermeule have carved out a niche in American legal discourse in advocating that the U.S. needs to turn to the legal “wisdom” of the German Nazi lawyer, Carl Schmitt. In Terror in the Balance, they suggest that the U.S. may need to adopt censorship for, among other reasons, “antigovernment speech may demoralize soldiers and civilians.” For precedent, they point out that “Martial law during the Civil War permitted the military to try and punish people who criticized the Lincoln administration’s conduct of the war.”
The Attack on ‘Lawfare’
Other prominent advocates of authoritarian legal practices present themselves as protecting against disloyal attorney who practice “lawfare,” which is defined as a form of “asymmetric warfare” that misuses domestic or international law to damage an opponent through legal actions in a courtroom. For instance, Ben Wittes of lawfareblog.com would seem to espouse this type of animosity toward public-interest lawyers who use the courts to defend First Amendment liberties.
A fallacious argument, made by Wittes in a paper which calls for “balancing” liberty and security, is his idiosyncratic belief that “in American constitutional law, for example, free speech does not exist as a general right of the public to communicate as much or as widely as it desires but as an individual right not to have government restrict one’s speech.”
This is contrary to the understanding of the Supreme Court which held in First Nat. Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, that: “[T]he First Amendment goes beyond protection of the press and the self-expression of individuals to prohibit government from limiting the stock of information from which members of the public may draw.” In other words, the First Amendment guarantees the public’s “right to know.”
Why does this matter? The Constitution’s Framers understood that an informed population was crucial for a Republic. As James Madison put it: “A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”
This understanding of the criticality of the free flow of information for wise democratic decision-making is particularly important for national security where ignorance comes with the highest cost. This understanding formed Clausewitz’s belief in a broad-based civilian decision-making process in matters of national security strategic policy, and not one driven by military leaders with their one-dimensional thinking process.
The Vietnam War is Exhibit A as proof of this. If it had been left to the Generals to decide, the war would have continued “perpetually” even though wiser heads realized from the beginning that it was unwinnable by U.S. terms of maintaining an unpopular government in South Vietnam. The antiwar movement, whatever the motives of some, proved to be more strategically astute than General William Westmoreland who would have continued the war until the U.S. bankrupted itself in the manner that the Soviet Union would years later in Afghanistan. It was the American antiwar movement which gave effect to Clausewitz’s strategy that when a war’s costs exceed its “benefits,” a way must be found to end it.
Curiously, Wittes accurately notes in Law and the Long War that to claim “the President has all the powers of a normal war yet few of its restraints, that the whole world is his battlefield, and that this state of affairs goes on in perpetuity is really akin to claiming a kind of worldwide martial law.” In fact, that’s exactly what the Justice Department argued in Hedges v. Obama without the admission as to martial law.
Dissent as Treason
Since the Vietnam War, the belief that the media and other critics of government policies act as fifth columnists has become commonplace in military-oriented journals and with the American authoritarian-oriented political class, expressed in articles such as William Bradford’s attack on “treasonous professors.”
To the question “how a scholar pushing these ideas” did not raise a red flag, that might best be asked of the National Security Law Journal’s previous editorial board. It is worth noting however that the editors who chose to publish Bradford’s article are not neophytes in national security issues or strangers to the military or government.
As described on the NSLJ website, the Editor-in-Chief from 2014-2015 has broad experience in homeland and national security programs from work at both the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security and currently serves (at the time of publication of Bradford’s article) as the Deputy Director for the Office of Preparedness Integration and Coordination at FEMA. A U.S. government official in other words.
The “Articles Selection Editor” is described as “a family physician with thirty years of experience in the foreign affairs and intelligence communities.” Websites online suggest his experience may have been acquired as a CIA employee. The executive editor appears to be a serving Marine Corps officer who attended law school as a military-funded student.
Significantly; Bradford was articulating precepts of the “U.S. common law of war” promoted by Chief Prosecutor Mark Martins because nothing Bradford advocated was inconsistent with William Whiting’s guidance to Union Generals. Except Whiting went even further and advised that judges in the Union states who “impeded” the military in any way by challenging their detentions were even greater “public enemies” than Confederate soldiers were.
This “U.S. common law of war” is a prosecution fabrication created by legal expediency in the absence of legitimate legal precedent for what the United States was doing with prisoners captured globally after 9/11. This legal invention came about when military commission prosecutors failed to prove that the offense of Material Support for Terrorism was an international law of war crime. So prosecutors dreamed up a “domestic common law of war.” This in fact is simply following the pattern of totalitarian states of the Twentieth Century.
Government-Media-Academic-Complex
The logic of Bradford’s argument is the same as that of the Defense Department in declaring that journalists may be deemed “unprivileged belligerents.” As quoted above, George H. Aldrich had observed that in Vietnam, both sides had as their goal “the destruction of the will to continue the struggle.”
Bradford argued that Islamists must overcome Americans’ support for the current war to prevail, and “it is the ‘informational dimension’ which is their main combat effort because it is U.S. political will which must be destroyed for them to win.” But he says Islamists lack skill “to navigate the information battlespace, employ PSYOPs, and beguile Americans into hostile judgments regarding the legitimacy of their cause.”
Therefore, according to Bradford, Islamists have identified “force multipliers with cultural knowledge of, social proximity to, and institutional capacity to attrit American political will. These critical nodes form an interconnected ‘government-media-academic complex’ (‘GMAC’) of public officials, media, and academics who mould mass opinion on legal and security issues . . . .”
Consequently, Bradford argues, within this triumvirate, “it is the wielders of combat power within these nodes – journalists, officials, and law professors – who possess the ideological power to defend or destroy American political will.”
While Bradford reserves special vituperation for his one-time fellow law professors, he states the “most transparent example of this power to shape popular opinion as to the legitimacy of U.S. participation in wars is the media.”
As proof, Bradford explained how this “disloyalty” of the media worked during the Vietnam War. He wrote: “During the Vietnam War, despite an unbroken series of U.S. battlefield victories, the media first surrendered itself over to a foreign enemy for use as a psychological weapon against Americans, not only expressing criticism of U.S. purpose and conduct but adopting an ‘antagonistic attitude toward everything America was and represented’ and ‘spinning’ U.S. military success to convince Americans that they were losing, and should quit, the war. Journalistic alchemists converted victory into defeat simply by pronouncing it.”
Space does not permit showing in how many ways this “stab in the back” myth is false. But this belief in the disloyalty of the media in Bradford’s view remains today. He wrote: “Defeatism, instinctive antipathy to war, and empathy for American adversaries persist within media.”
Targeting Journalists
The right-wing militarist Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), with mostly retired U.S. military officers serving as advisers, has advocated targeting journalists with military attacks. Writing in The Journal of International Security Affairs in 2009, retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Ralph Peters wrote:
“Today, the United States and its allies will never face a lone enemy on the battlefield. There will always be a hostile third party in the fight, but one which we not only refrain from attacking but are hesitant to annoy: the media . . . . Future wars may require censorship, news blackouts and, ultimately, military attacks on the partisan media.” (Emphasis in original.)
The rationale for that deranged thinking was first propounded by Admiral Ulysses S. Grant Sharp and other authoritarian-minded officers after the Vietnam War. Sharp explained, our “will” was eroded because “we were subjected to a skillfully waged subversive propaganda campaign, aided and abetted by the media’s bombardment of sensationalism, rumors and half-truths about the Vietnam affair — a campaign that destroyed our national unity.” William C. Bradford apparently adopted and internalized this belief, as have many other military officers.
That “stab in the back” myth was propagated by a number of U.S. military officers as well as President Richard Nixon (as explained here). It was more comfortable to believe that than that the military architects of the war did not understand what they were doing. So they shifted blame onto members of the media who were astute enough to recognize and report on the military’s failure and war crimes, such as My Lai.
But those “critical” journalists, along with critics at home, were only recognizing what smarter Generals such as General Frederick Weyand recognized from the beginning. That is, the war was unwinnable by the U.S. because it was maintaining in power its despotic corrupt ally, the South Vietnamese government, against its own people. Whether or not what came later was worse for the Vietnamese people was unforeseeable by the majority of the people. What was in front of their eyes was the military oppression of American and South Vietnamese forces and secret police.
Information Warfare Today
In 1999, the Rand Corporation published a collection of articles in Strategic Appraisal: The Changing Role of Information in Warfare. The volume was edited by Zalmay Khalilzad, the alleged author of the Defense Department’s 1992 Defense Planning Guidance, which was drafted when Dick Cheney was Defense Secretary and Paul Wolfowitz was Under Secretary of Defense – and promulgated a theory of permanent U.S. global dominance.
One chapter of Rand’s Strategic Appraisal was written by Jeremy Shapiro, now a special adviser at the U.S. State Department, according to Wikipedia. Shapiro wrote that the inability to control information flows was widely cited as playing an essential role in the downfall of the communist regimes of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.
He stated that perception management was “the vogue term for psychological operations or propaganda directed at the public.” As he expressed it, many observers worried that potential foes could use techniques of perception management with asymmetric strategies with their effect on public opinion to “destroy the will of the United States to wage war.”
Consequently, “Warfare in this new political environment consists largely of the battle to shape the political context of the war and the meaning of victory.”
Another chapter on Ethics and Information Warfare by John Arquilla makes clear that information warfare must be understood as “a true form of war.” The range of information warfare operations, according to Arquilla, extends “from the battlefield to the enemy home front.” Information warfare is designed “to strike directly at the will and logistical support of an opponent.”
This notion of information warfare, that it can be pursued without a need to defeat an adversary’s armed forces, is an area of particular interest, according to Arquilla. What he means is that it necessitates counter measures when it is seen as directed at the U.S. as now provided for in the new LOW Manual.
Important to note, according to Arquilla, is that there is an inherent blurriness with defining “combatants” and “acts of war.” Equating information warfare to guerrilla warfare in which civilians often engage in the fighting, Arquilla states “in information warfare, almost anyone can engage in the fighting.”
Consequently, the ability to engage in this form of conflict is now in the hands of small groups and individuals, offering up “the prospect of potentially quite large numbers of information warfare-capable combatants emerging, often pursuing their own, as opposed to some state’s policies,” Arquilla wrote.
Therefore, a “concern” for information warfare at the time of the Rand study in 1999 was the problem of maintaining “noncombatant immunity.” That’s because the “civilian-oriented target set is huge and likely to be more vulnerable than the related set of military infrastructures . . . . Since a significant aspect of information warfare is aimed at civilian and civilian-oriented targets, despite its negligible lethality, it nonetheless violates the principle of noncombatant immunity, given that civilian economic or other assets are deliberately targeted.”
What Arquillo is saying is that civilians who are alleged to engage in information warfare, such as professors and journalists, lose their “noncombatant immunity” and can be attacked. The “blurriness” of defining “combatants” and “acts of war” was removed after 9/11 with the invention of the “unlawful combatant” designation, later renamed “unprivileged belligerent” to mimic language in the Geneva Conventions.
Then it was just a matter of adding the similarly invented “U.S. domestic common law of war” with its martial law precedents and a framework has been built for seeing critical journalists and law professors as “unprivileged belligerents,” as Bradford indiscreetly wrote.
Arquilla claims that information warfare operations extend to the “home front” and are designed “to strike directly at the will and logistical support of an opponent.” That is to equate what is deemed information warfare to sabotage of the population’s psychological will to fight a war, and dissidents to saboteurs.
Perpetual War
But this is a perpetual war driven by U.S. operations, according to a chapter written by Stephen T. Hosmer on psychological effects of information warfare. Here, it is stated that “the expanding options for reaching audiences in countries and groups that could become future U.S. adversaries make it important that the United States begin its psychological conditioning in peacetime.” Thus, it is necessary “to begin to soften the fighting will of the potential adversary’s armed forces in the event conflict does occur.”
As information warfare is held to be “true war,” this means that the U.S. is perpetually committing acts of war against those deemed “potential” adversaries. Little wonder that Vladimir Putin sees Russia as under assault by the United States and attempts to counter U.S. information warfare.
This same logic is applied to counter-insurgency. The 2014 COIN Manual, FM 3-24, defines “Information Operations” as information-related capabilities “to influence, disrupt, corrupt, or usurp the decisionmaking of adversaries and potential adversaries while protecting our own.”
Those we “protect ourselves from” can logically be seen as the internal enemy, as William Bradford saw it, such as critical law professors and journalists, just as Augusto Pinochet did in Chile with dissidents.
With the totalitarian logic of information-warfare theorists, internalized now throughout much of the U.S. government counter-terrorism community, it should be apparent to all but the most obtuse why the DOD deems a journalist who writes critically of U.S. government war policy an “unprivileged belligerent,” an enemy, as in the Law of War manual. William C. Bradford obviously absorbed this doctrine but was indiscreet enough to articulate it fully.
It Has Happened Here!
That’s the only conclusion one can draw from reading the transcript of the Hedges v. Obama lawsuit. In that lawsuit, plaintiffs, including journalists and political activists, challenged the authority provided under Sec. 1021 of the 2012 National Defense Authorization for removal out from under the protection of the Constitution of those deemed unprivileged belligerents. That is, civilians suspected of lending any “support” to anyone whom the U.S. government might deem as having something to do with terrorism.
“Support” can be as William Whiting described it in 1862 and as what is seen as “information warfare” by the U.S. military today: a sentiment of hostility to the government “to undermine confidence in its capacity or its integrity, to diminish, demoralize . . . its armies, to break down confidence in those who are intrusted with its military operations in the field.”
Reminiscent of the Sinclair Lewis novel It Can’t Happen Here where those accused of crimes against the government are tried by military judges as in the U.S. Military Commissions, a Justice Department attorney arguing on behalf of the United States epitomized the legal reasoning that one would see in a totalitarian state in arguing why the draconian “Law of War” is a substitute for the Constitution.
The Court asked Assistant U.S. Attorney Benjamin Torrance if he would agree, “as a principled matter, that the President can’t, in the name of the national security of the United States, just decide to detain whomever he believes it is important to detain or necessary to detain to prevent a terrorist act within the United States?”
Rather than giving a straight affirmative answer to a fundamental principle of the U.S. Constitution, Torrance dissembled, only agreeing that that description would seem “quite broad,” especially if citizens. But he added disingenuously that it was the practice of the government “not to keep people apprehended in the U.S.”
Which is true, it is known that people detained by the U.S. military and CIA have been placed everywhere but in the U.S. so that Constitutional rights could not attach. Under Section 1021, that “inconvenience” to the government would not be necessary.
When asked by the Court if he, the Justice Department attorney, would agree that a different administration could change its mind with respect to whether or not Sec. 1021 would be applied in any way to American citizens, he dissembled again, answering: “Is that possible? Yes, but it is speculative and conjecture and that cannot be the basis for an injury in fact.”
So U.S. citizens or anyone else are left to understand that they have no rights remaining under the Constitution. If a supposed “right” is contingent upon who is President, it is not a right and the U.S. is no longer under the rule of law.
In discussing whether activist and journalist Birgitta Jónsdóttir, a citizen of Iceland, could be subject to U.S. military detention or trial by military commission, Assistant U.S. Attorney Torrance would only disingenuously answer that “her activities as she alleges them, do not implicate this.” Disingenuous because he knew based upon the answer he previously gave that the law of war is arbitrary and its interpretation contingent upon a military commander, whoever that may be, at present or in the future.
What could happen to Ms. Jónsdóttir would be completely out of her control should the U.S. government decide to deem her an “unprivileged belligerent,” regardless of whether her expressive activities changed positively or negatively, or remained the same. Her risk of detention per the Justice Department is entirely at the sufferance of whatever administration may be in place at any given moment.
Any doubt that the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, along with Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, is believed by the U.S. Executive Branch to give it the untrammeled power that Article 48 of the Weimar Germany constitution gave to the German President in 1933 was settled by the arguments made by the Justice Department attorney in Hedges v. Obama.
Setting First Amendment Aside
One does not need to speculate that the U.S. government no longer sees First Amendment activities as protected. Government arguments, which were made in the Hedges v. Obama lawsuit, revealed that the Justice Department, speaking for the Executive Branch, considers protection of the Bill of Rights subordinate to the claim of “war powers” by the Executive. One can only be willfully blind to fail to see this.
By the Justice Department’s court arguments and filings, the protections afforded by the U.S. Bill of Rights are no more secure today than they were to Japanese-Americans when Western District military commander General DeWitt decided to remove them from their homes on the West Coast and intern them in what were initially called, “concentration camps.”
The American Bar Association Journal reported in 2014 that Justice Antonin Scalia told students in Hawaii that “the Supreme Court’s Korematsu decision upholding the internment of Japanese Americans was wrong, but it could happen again in war time.” But contrary to Scalia stating that Korematsu had been repudiated, Korematsu has never been overruled.
The court could get a chance to do so, the ABA article stated, in the Hedges v. Obama case “involving the military detention without trial of people accused of aiding terrorism.” But that opportunity has passed.
A U.S. District Court issued a permanent injunction blocking the law’s indefinite detention powers but that ruling was overturned by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. A petition to the U.S. Supreme Court asked the justices to overturn Sec. 1021, the federal law authorizing such detentions and stated the justices should consider overruling Korematsu. But the Supreme Court declined to hear the case in 2014, leaving the Appeals Court’s ruling intact.
The Supreme Court’s decision to not overturn Korematsu allows General DeWitt’s World War II decision to intern Japanese-Americans in concentration camps to stand as a shining example of what Brig. General Marks Martins proudly holds up to the world as the “U.S. domestic common law of war.”
Todd E. Pierce retired as a Major in the US Army Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps in November 2012. His most recent assignment was defense counsel in the Office of Chief Defense Counsel, Office of Military Commissions.
by Luther Blissett » Mon Sep 14, 2015 11:36 am
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