Sunday, May 3, 2015

Police State Update

Turning America into a Battlefield: A Blueprint for Locking Down the Nation, Posted on May 1, 2015 Written by John Whitehead, rutherford.org
In the coun­cils of gov­ern­ment, we must guard against the acqui­si­tion of unwar­ranted influ­ence, whether sought or unsought, by the mil­i­tary indus­trial com­plex. The poten­tial for the dis­as­trous rise of mis­placed power exists and will per­sist. We must never let the weight of this com­bi­na­tion endan­ger our lib­er­ties or demo­c­ra­tic processes. We should take noth­ing for granted. Only an alert and knowl­edge­able cit­i­zenry can com­pel the proper mesh­ing of the huge indus­trial and mil­i­tary machin­ery of defense with our peace­ful meth­ods and goals, so that secu­rity and lib­erty may pros­per together.—President Dwight D. Eisen­hower, 1961
A stand­ing army—something that pro­pelled the early colonists into revolution—strips the Amer­i­can peo­ple of any ves­tige of free­dom. How can there be any sem­blance of free­dom when there are tanks in the streets, mil­i­tary encamp­ments in cities, Black­hawk heli­copters and armed drones patrolling overhead?
It was for this rea­son that those who estab­lished Amer­ica vested con­trol of the mil­i­tary in a civil­ian gov­ern­ment, with a civil­ian commander-in-chief. They did not want a mil­i­tary gov­ern­ment, ruled by force. Rather, they opted for a repub­lic bound by the rule of law: the U.S. Constitution.
Unfor­tu­nately, with the Con­sti­tu­tion under con­stant attack, the military’s power, influ­ence and author­ity have grown dra­mat­i­cally. Even the Posse Comi­ta­tus Act of 1878, which makes it a crime for the gov­ern­ment to use the mil­i­tary to carry out arrests, searches, seizure of evi­dence and other activ­i­ties nor­mally han­dled by a civil­ian police force, has been weak­ened by both Barack Obama and George W. Bush, who ush­ered in exemp­tions allow­ing troops to deploy domes­ti­cally and arrest civil­ians in the wake of alleged ter­ror­ist acts.
Now we find our­selves strug­gling to retain some sem­blance of free­dom in the face of police and law enforce­ment agen­cies that look and act like the mil­i­tary and have just as lit­tle regard for the Fourth Amend­ment, laws such as the NDAA that allow the mil­i­tary to arrest and indef­i­nitely detain Amer­i­can cit­i­zens, and mil­i­tary drills that accli­mate the Amer­i­can peo­ple to the sight of armored tanks in the streets, mil­i­tary encamp­ments in cities, and com­bat air­craft patrolling overhead.
Mak­ing mat­ters worse, we find out that the mil­i­tary plans to use south­west­ern states as stag­ing grounds for guerilla war­fare drills in which highly-trained mil­i­tary troops equipped with all man­ner of weapons turn Amer­i­can towns and cities in quasi-battlefields. Why? As they tell us, it’s so that spe­cial oper­a­tions forces can get “real­is­tic mil­i­tary train­ing” in “hos­tile” territory.
They’ve even got a name for the exer­cise: Jade Helm 15.
Whether or not Amer­i­cans have any­thing to fear from Jade Helm 15, a covert, multi-agency, multi-state, eight-week mil­i­tary train­ing exer­cise set to take place this sum­mer from July 15 through Sept. 15, remains to be seen.
Insist­ing that there’s noth­ing to be alarmed about, the Wash­ing­ton Post took great pains to point out that these mil­i­tary exer­cises on Amer­i­can soil are noth­ing new. For instance, there was Oper­a­tion Bold Alli­ga­tor, in which in which thou­sands of Marines and sailors car­ried out amphibi­ous exer­cises against “insur­gent” forces in Geor­gia and Florida. Oper­a­tion Robin Sage had Green Beret sol­diers engag­ing in guer­rilla war­fare in North Car­olina. And Oper­a­tion Derna Bridge sends Marine spe­cial forces into parts of South Car­olina and the National Forest.
Yet if Amer­i­cans are uneasy about this summer’s planned Jade Helm 15 mil­i­tary exer­cises, they have every right to be.
After all, haven’t we been urged time and time again to just “trust” the gov­ern­ment to respect our rights and abide by the rule of law only to find that, in fact, our rights were being plun­dered and the Con­sti­tu­tion dis­re­garded at every turn?
Let’s assume, for the moment, that Jade Helm 15 is not a thinly veiled mil­i­tary plot to take over the coun­try lifted straight out of direc­tor John Frankenheimer’s 1964 polit­i­cal thriller Seven Days in May, as some fear, but is merely a “rou­tine” exer­cise for troops, albeit a bla­tantly intim­i­dat­ing flex­ing of the military’s muscles.
The prob­lem arises when you start to add Jade Helm onto the list of other trou­bling devel­op­ments that have taken place over the past 30 years or more: the expan­sion of the mil­i­tary indus­trial com­plex and its influ­ence in Wash­ing­ton DC, the ram­pant sur­veil­lance, the corporate-funded elec­tions and revolv­ing door between lob­by­ists and elected offi­cials, the mil­i­ta­rized police, the loss of our free­doms, the injus­tice of the courts, the pri­va­tized pris­ons, the school lock­downs, the road­side strip searches, the mil­i­tary drills on domes­tic soil, the fusion cen­ters and the simul­ta­ne­ous fus­ing of every branch of law enforce­ment (fed­eral, state and local), the stock­pil­ing of ammu­ni­tion by var­i­ous gov­ern­ment agen­cies, the active shooter drills that are indis­tin­guish­able from actual crises, the econ­omy flirt­ing with near col­lapse, etc.
Sud­denly, the over­all pic­ture seems that much more sin­is­ter. Clearly, as I point out in my new book Bat­tle­field Amer­ica: The War on the Amer­i­can Peo­ple, there’s a larger agenda at work here.
Seven years ago, the U.S. Army War Col­lege issued a report call­ing on the mil­i­tary to be pre­pared should they need to put down civil unrest within the coun­try. Sum­ma­riz­ing the report, inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ist Chris Hedges declared, “The mil­i­tary must be pre­pared, the doc­u­ment warned, for a ‘vio­lent, strate­gic dis­lo­ca­tion inside the United States,’ which could be pro­voked by ‘unfore­seen eco­nomic col­lapse,’ ‘pur­pose­ful domes­tic resis­tance,’ ‘per­va­sive pub­lic health emer­gen­cies’ or ‘loss of func­tion­ing polit­i­cal and legal order.’ The ‘wide­spread civil vio­lence,’ the doc­u­ment said, ‘would force the defense estab­lish­ment to reori­ent pri­or­i­ties in extremis to defend basic domes­tic order and human security.’”
At what point will all of the government’s care­fully drawn plans for deal­ing with civil unrest, “home­grown” ter­ror­ism and tar­get­ing pre-crime become a uni­fied blue­print for lock­ing down the nation?
For instance, what’s the ratio­nale behind turn­ing gov­ern­ment agen­cies into mil­i­tary out­posts? There has been a notable buildup in recent years of SWAT teams within non-security-related fed­eral agen­cies such as Depart­ment of Agri­cul­ture, the Rail­road Retire­ment Board, the Ten­nessee Val­ley Author­ity, the Office of Per­son­nel Man­age­ment, the Con­sumer Prod­uct Safety Com­mis­sion, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Ser­vice and the Edu­ca­tion Depart­ment. As of 2008, “73 fed­eral law enforce­ment agen­cies… [employ] approx­i­mately 120,000 armed full-time on-duty offi­cers with arrest author­ity.” Four-fifths of those offi­cers are under the com­mand of either the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­rity (DHS) or the Depart­ment of Justice.
What’s with all of the gov­ern­ment agen­cies stock­pil­ing hol­low point bul­lets? For exam­ple, why does the Depart­ment of Agri­cul­ture need .40 cal­iber semi­au­to­matic sub­ma­chine guns and 320,000 rounds of hol­low point bul­lets? For that mat­ter, why do its agents need bal­lis­tic vests and body armor?
Why does the Postal Ser­vice need “assorted small arms ammu­ni­tion”? Why did the DHS pur­chase “1.6 bil­lion rounds of hollow-point ammu­ni­tion, along with 7,000 fully-automatic 5.56x45mm NATO ‘per­sonal defense weapons’ plus a huge stash of 30-round high-capacity mag­a­zines”? That’s in addi­tion to the FBI’s request for 100 mil­lion hollow-point rounds. The Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion, IRS, the Social Secu­rity Admin­is­tra­tion, and the National Oceanic and Atmos­pheric Admin­is­tra­tion, which over­sees the National Weather Ser­vice, are also among the fed­eral agen­cies which have taken to pur­chas­ing ammu­ni­tion and weaponry in bulk.
Why is the fed­eral gov­ern­ment dis­trib­ut­ing obscene amounts of mil­i­tary equip­ment, weapons and ammu­ni­tion to police depart­ments around the coun­try? And why is DHS acquir­ing more than 2,500 Mine-Resistant Armored Pro­tec­tion (MRAP) vehi­cles, only to pass them around to local police depart­ments across the coun­try? Accord­ing to the New York Times:
As Pres­i­dent Obama ush­ers in the end of what he called America’s “long sea­son of war,” the for­mer tools of com­bat — M-16 rifles, grenade launch­ers, silencers and more — are end­ing up in local police depart­ments, often with lit­tle pub­lic notice. Dur­ing the Obama admin­is­tra­tion, accord­ing to Pen­ta­gon data, police depart­ments have received tens of thou­sands of machine guns; nearly 200,000 ammu­ni­tion mag­a­zines; thou­sands of pieces of cam­ou­flage and night-vision equip­ment; and hun­dreds of silencers, armored cars and air­craft. The equip­ment has been added to the armories of police depart­ments that already look and act like mil­i­tary units.
Why is the mil­i­tary part­ner­ing with local police to con­duct train­ing drills around the coun­try? And what exactly are they train­ing for? In Rich­land, South Car­olina, for instance, U.S. army spe­cial forces par­tic­i­pated in joint and secre­tive exer­cises and train­ing with local deputies. The pub­lic was dis­al­lowed from obtain­ing any infor­ma­tion about the pur­pose of the drills, other than being told that they might be loud and to not be alarmed. The Army and DHS also car­ried out sim­i­lar drills and maneu­vers involv­ing Black Hawk heli­copters in Texas, Florida, and other loca­tions through­out the U.S., osten­si­bly in order to pro­vide local police with “real­is­tic” urban training.
What is being done to pro­tect the Amer­i­can pop­u­lace from the threat of mil­i­tary arms and forces, includ­ing unarmed drones, being used against them? Pol­icy ana­lysts point to Direc­tive No. 3025.18, “Defense Sup­port of Civil Author­i­ties” (issued on Dec. 29, 2010), as jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for the government’s use of mil­i­tary force to put down civil unrest within the United States.
Why is FEMA stock­pil­ing mas­sive quan­ti­ties of emer­gency sup­plies? On Jan­u­ary 10, 2014, FEMA made a state­ment enlist­ing the ser­vice of con­trac­tors who could “sup­ply med­ical bio­haz­ard dis­posal capa­bil­i­ties and 40 yard dump­sters to 1,000 tent hos­pi­tals across the United States; all required on 24–48 hour notice.” This coin­cides with other med­ical requests seek­ing mas­sive amounts of sup­plies, such as “31,000,000 flu vac­ci­na­tions,” “100,000 each of win­ter shirts and pants and the same for sum­mer” and other goods and ser­vices requests as well like tarps, man­u­fac­tured hous­ing units, and bev­er­ages. And why does the TSA need $21,000 worth of potas­sium chlo­rate, a chem­i­cal com­pound often used in explosives?
Why is the Pen­ta­gon con­tin­u­ing to pur­chase mass amounts of ammu­ni­tion while at the same time prepar­ing to destroy more than $1 bil­lion worth of bul­lets and mis­siles that are still viable?
More­over, what is really being done to hold the Pen­ta­gon account­able for its doc­tored ledgers, fraud, waste and mis­man­age­ment, which has cost the tax­payer tril­lions of dol­lars? Accord­ing to Reuters, “The Pen­ta­gon is the only fed­eral agency that has not com­plied with a law that requires annual audits of all gov­ern­ment depart­ments. That means that the $8.5 tril­lion in tax­payer money doled out by Con­gress to the Pen­ta­gon since 1996, the first year it was sup­posed to be audited, has never been accounted for. That sum exceeds the value of China’s eco­nomic output.”
Given the sim­i­lar­i­ties between the government’s Live Active Shooter Drill train­ing exer­cises, car­ried out at schools, in shop­ping malls, and on pub­lic tran­sit, which can and do fool law enforce­ment offi­cials, stu­dents, teach­ers and bystanders into think­ing it’s a real cri­sis, how much of what is being passed off as real is, in fact, being staged by DHS for the “ben­e­fit” of train­ing law enforce­ment, leav­ing us none the wiser? These train­ing exer­cises come com­plete with their own set of pro­fes­sion­ally trained Cri­sis Actors play­ing the parts of shoot­ers, bystanders and vic­tims in order to help schools and first respon­ders cre­ate real­is­tic drills, full-scale exer­cises, high-fidelity sim­u­la­tions, and inter­ac­tive 3D films.
Given that Amer­i­cans are 110 times more likely to die of food­borne ill­ness than in a ter­ror­ist attack, why is the gov­ern­ment spend­ing tril­lions of dol­lars on “national secu­rity”? How exactly is the $75 bil­lion given to var­i­ous intel­li­gence agen­cies annu­ally to keep us “safe” being spent? And why is the DHS giv­ing away mil­lions of dol­lars’ worth of fed­eral secu­rity grants to states that fed­eral intel­li­gence agen­cies ruled have “no spe­cific for­eign or domes­tic ter­ror­ism threat”?
Why is the gov­ern­ment amass­ing names and infor­ma­tion on Amer­i­cans con­sid­ered to be threats to the nation, and what cri­te­ria is the gov­ern­ment using for this data­base? Keep in mind that this per­sonal infor­ma­tion is being acquired and kept with­out war­rant or court order. It’s been sug­gested that in the event of nuclear war, the destruc­tion of the U.S. Gov­ern­ment, and the dec­la­ra­tion of mar­tial law, this Main Core data­base, which as of 2008 con­tained some 8 mil­lion names of Amer­i­cans, would be used by mil­i­tary offi­cials to locate and round up Amer­i­cans seen as threats to national secu­rity, a pro­gram to be car­ried about by the Army and FEMA.
Taken indi­vid­u­ally, these ques­tions are alarm­ing enough. But put them together and they add up to the kind of trou­ble that the Amer­i­can found­ing fathers not only warned against but from which they fought to free themselves.
Indeed, when viewed col­lec­tively, they leave one won­der­ing what exactly the U.S. gov­ern­ment is prepar­ing for and whether Amer­i­can cit­i­zens shouldn’t be prepar­ing, as well, for that even­tu­al­ity when our so-called “gov­ern­ment of the peo­ple, by the peo­ple, for the peo­ple” is no longer answer­able to “we the people.”
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