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Monday, February 1, 2010

Framing their Argument: Civil Unrest and the Push Towards Martial Law

Hopefully we can all agree that a peace officer's primary duty should be to protect the people's rights, and secondly to protect the people's property within their jurisdiction.

NOTE: IF AN OFFICER READS THIS AND FEELS DIFFERENTLY, PLEASE COMMENT BELOW, AND PREPARE TO ARGUE YOUR POINT.

As the process of global interdependence unfolds, the prime beneficiaries of this system are eroding the legal safeguards against totalitarian government. The Patriot Act has severely undermined the freedoms of the American people, and the banker bailout of late 2008 has funneled trillions of dollars into the hands of the global financial elite. Despite public optimism at the onset of the Obama administration, it is evident that government continues in the direction of secrecy, cronyism, and widespread corruption. As it becomes clear that real economic recovery is not in the cards, and that Americans are in for a serious decrease in their standards of living, the oligarchs are looking at ways of maintaining their social order.

As this blog has covered in the past, there is a serious risk of civil unrest in the coming years. The question is, will law enforcement generally demand that the people (themselves and their families included) see that justice is done, no matter how high up the corruption goes, or will they simply follow orders from criminals? Being that the globalist elite have their agents deep within all relevant levels of government, it is in their interests to oversee a federal takeover of state and local police. The intellectual framework for this consolidation is being lain as we speak; the old Hegelian Dialectic: problem, reaction, solution.

Now, we all know that a cop's job is not easy. But at a time when our culture is spiritually sick, our savings is in the midst of destruction, and for millions the future looks quite bleak, it isn't about to get any easier. By nearly any measure, the general public is mentally/spiritually ill. Hope is on the decline, and violence is on the rise. At a time when government is roundly mistrusted and utterly irresponsible in fiscal matters, the police are being used as the state's enforcer, taxman, and bill collector. Moreover, the police (by default) stand as a separation between the government and the people. It is the American political establishment that has put law enforcement officers (LEOs) in this position, and their manipulation is plain to see in the media and on the web.

The trio of articles below lay out this version of the Hegelian Dialectic. Although I doubt that there was any intentional collaboration between the authors of the following pieces, these ideas are rampant on the intellectual outlets for the Law Enforcement community. Each article has been published within the last six-to-eight weeks, and intentionally promotes an antagonistic view of the current societal landscape, and the steps the authors deem necessary to confront it.


PROBLEM: "Are America's officers at war?" - Joel F. Shults, Ed.D.


As if the precarious situation that LEOs have been shoved into isn't problematic enough, Chief Joel Schultz of Alamosa, Colorado highlights the recent spike in police homicides. Schultz ties the pain of losing his comrades to the angry taunting of minorities who were on the scene following the shooter's execution, and anonymous message board posts after the well-publicized deaths of three Oakland police officers:

    "They will say the officers “got what they deserved” and that the public has lost confidence, that police are a violent racist occupying force. One blog said, “As the police and media work to defame and slander Lovelle Mixon [the murderer], we express our total solidarity.”"

It is not difficult to find hate-laced tirades against anyone, on any subject in the anonymous world of internet message boards (police officers not excluded). Surprisingly, Schultz seems most concerned about "a perfect storm of social factors" leading to widespread public criticism of heavy-handed police actions. In the wake of the recent rash of police murders, Schultz is just as concerned with media and public criticism of law enforcement agencies. He uses rhetoric that intends to anger fellow officers, and then attempts to psychologically profile those who are critical of the police; suggesting that anyone tired of police using brutal force against fellow citizens have some dangerous larger agenda. Rather than performing any self-evaluation, particularly regarding attitudes within minority populations, Schultz determines "we need to take the kind of connect-the-dots examination of patterns of violence that we have learned to do with terrorism." Like many posts on LEO forums like policeone.com,officer.com, and policelink, the article sends a powerful (if not subconscious) message to the casual reader: You are at war! It's you against the world! And that's a dangerous precedent to set.

REACTION: "SWAT options for multiple shooter terrorist attacks" - Lt. Andrew Esposito

If we are to accept the thesis of Mr. Schultz, then the officer on the beat is no longer a public servant, but a soldier in a war zone against a determined enemy. The predictable recommendation is that the police are too lightly armed against potential crises like those in Beslan and Mumbai in recent years. Lieutenant Andrew Esposito, Commander of Rockland County, NY's (REACT) anti-terror unit, warns of the need to investigate "how to deal with terrorism, whether it is domestic or foreign." Lt. Esposito bemoans the restraint that Posse Comitatus puts onto law enforcement in these United States:

    "We, on the other hand, follow the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 (meaning “the power of the county”), which was passed following the civil war after the federal government used troops to uphold the law, or “occupy”, the south in an effort to stabilize the country. Due to this statue, which was passed over one hundred years ago, our country is now more vulnerable."

Well, Lieutenant, the Bill of Rights is a couple of centuries old. Has it become outdated? Common Law has served as our legal framework for a half of a millennium, should we get rid of it, too? This article serves as an attempt to justify a return to an ugly period in American history, the Reconstruction era, which effectively diluted our republican form of government. Those state boundaries represent the people's only safeguard from a tyrannical federal government. We are not Cuba or Pakistan, and we do not want soldiers in our streets. Lt. Esposito believes that "due to Posse Comitatus, [law enforcement] response will be slow, and too late." The Lieutenant spends the rest of the article laying out the shortfalls of police capability to handle mass hostage-type attacks, and the lacking capacity for LEOs to serve as infantryman in an emergency. This piece serves to illustrate the perceived necessity for the army to be able to operate as another asset of law enforcement inside the US.      

SOLUTION: A Stability Police Force for the United States - RAND     Corporation

Right on cue, the infamous Rand Corporation has released their plan for a hybrid Army/civilian high-end policing outfit; the Stability Police Force (SPF) for America. Amazingly, this report outlines just the type of force, with the type of capabilities, called for in Lt. Esposito's article. In their introduction, they skirt around the fact that the unit is intended for domestic operations. But in contemplating the current strategy options, Rand concludes that the current status of forces is:

    "constrained by the limits placed on its ability to perform civilian policing functions by the Posse Comitatus Act. Without relief from this constraint, it could not take advantage of the opportunities provided the hybrid staffing option to develop and maintain the needed skills."

Those who had been tasked to put this report together almost certainly had a primary objective of justifying an end to Posse Comitatus, a frightening thought for any liberty concerned historian. The authors skillfully frame the debate around the need for an effective police force with availability for rapid foreign deployment. The SPF "can perform law enforcement functions and so contribute to domestic tranquility and homeland defense when not deployed" p105 (anyone else thinking 'enemy combatant status'?). Ah, yes, they will contribute to domestic tranquility and receive vital training; RAND has it all figured out. They envision something of a European model of deployment, and lay it out as such:

    "forces perform civilian functions when they are not deployed abroad. For instance, Carabinieri officers perform a range of civilian tasks in Italy, such as countering organized crime and conducting crowd and riot control. Gendarmerie officers are deployed under the Ministry of Interior in France, and routinely perform such tasks as criminal investigations and highway patrol. We concluded that this practice of engaging in civilian tasks on a routine basis was extremely useful preparation for when the organizations deployed abroad during stability operations. Such experience is difficult to get only through training."

The report touted that SPF soldiers "working as police officers would greatly contribute to the state of training and readiness of SPF personnel." Although the authors admit that the hurdles are "probably insurmountable," RAND does submit "the issue of contractors performing law enforcement functions."

Much of the document centers around high-end policing, or police that

    "fill a critical gap between military forces and civilian police. They are trained to deal with higher levels of crime and violence than regular civilian police, and are able to perform such tasks as high-end criminality identification, criminal investigation, special weapons and tactics (SWAT), crowd and riot control, and intelligence collection and analysis."

It is troublesome that intelligence agencies and non-governmental organizations have forecast an increase in civil unrest. The ongoing tea-party movement is likely the beginning of a popular uprising against the status-quo. Rather than to investigate government corruption and imprison the perpetrators of Wall St. fraud, articles such as these suggest that the military-industrial-complex is gearing up to face down those who demand justice on behalf of those who have perpetrated the criminal conspiracy.

























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