“We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we’ve set. We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.” ~ Barack Hussein Obama, 2008 campaign
The ACLU, the bastion of liberalism, has at last decided, maybe, to intervene on the behalf of all Americans against the militarization of America.
Affiliates in 23 states – Arizona, Arkansas, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, New Hampshire, Michigan, Missouri, Mississippi, Montana, Maine, Massachusetts, Nebraska, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, – filed more than 225 public records requests to determine the extent to which local police are using taxpayer subsidized military technology and tactics once reserved for use overseas.
Kara Dansky, senior counsel for the ACLU’s Center for Justice says that “equipping state and local law enforcement with military weapons and vehicles, military tactical training, and actual military assistance to conduction traditional law enforcement erodes civil liberties and encourages aggressive policing. . .”
Once all information has been collected and analyzed, the ACLU may or may not use the information to recommend changes in law and policy.
This militarization began shortly after 9/11 which the government used as an excuse to take control and what better way to control the population than federalized state and local police departments?
Billions of taxpayer dollars have been spent to arm police forces across the country with military weapons, body armor, helicopters, tanks, armored personnel carriers and to what end? In some places local and state police are better armed than our soldiers fighting overseas.
Having watered down the Fourth Amendment’s strong prohibitions intended to keep police in check, we now find ourselves in the unenviable position of having militarized standing armies enforcing the law. Where the police once operated as public servants, today that relationship has been turned on its head to such an extent that if we fail to obey anyone with a badge, we risk death.
In addition to militarized weapons and equipment, the government has also instituted an incentive program through the Byrne Grant Formula, to reward police departments based on the number of arrests, the number of warrants served or the number of drugs seized. At the beginning of his term, Obama, using so-called stimulus money – boosted Grant money to inject $2 billion into the program.
I am not a conspiracy nut but something smells! For what purpose is the government stockpiling ammo and emergency food supplies? Why militarize police? What do they know that we don’t?
A 2008 report produced by the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Institute warned that we might experience massive civil unrest in the wake of a series of crises, which it termed “strategic shock,” nd that “widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reprioritize itself to defend basic domestic order and human security.” The report, authored by Retired Lt. Col. Nathan Freir, concluded that the military may be needed to squash “purposeful domestic resistance.”
Resistance to what? A military take-over? The collapse of the U.S. economy?
In 1987, Senator Daniel Inouye Chaired the Senate Select Committee on Secret Military Assistance to Iran and the Nicaraguan Opposition. A witness to the internment of thousands of Japanese-Americans during WW II, Senator Inouye warned us that: “There exists a shadowy government with its own Air Force, its own Navy, its own fundraising mechanism and the ability to pursue its own ideas of national interest, free from all checks and balances, and free from the law itself.”
