Hardly a day goes by without news of a police killing. And each time we hear from scholars and
observers that the police is too militarized.
No doubt!
In 2014, I was flattered to have been approached by the
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Shasta Chapter to be their keynote
speaker to address Government Secrecy,
Drones, and Militarization. After
each police involved death, I would revisit my notes and wonder why I never
published them. After watching this
video clip on my FB page on July 10, 2016, I decided to share an excerpt
from the ACLU address of April 13, 2014.
(Of note, at the time of the talk, “Black Lives Matter” had
not appeared on the national stage, nor had the training of police in Israel been
fully exposed; as such, these very important factors were not included in the
talk/excerpt below. The following is
simply talking points stringed together and lacks the flow and flare of
academic writing.)
******************************
Historians and
political scientists have warned us about dangerous war fever sweeping the United
States. Today we have gone beyond that.
The “Global War on Terror”, a war indefinite in duration,
against an ill-defined and shifting enemy, al-Qaeda, [ISIS did not exist in the
official narrative at the time] is now being armed in Syria [“moderates”]
without a clear explanation of American strategy or a specific definition of
victory, or even a way to measure progress in the struggle has taken its toll
on civil liberty. The problem of
militarization poses a danger to the very character of American government and
society.
In his first public interview after retiring
from active duty in 2003, General Tommy Franks identified the single most
dangerous possibility offered by an endless war on terrorism: An attack with weapons
of mass
destruction “just to create casualties ... to terrify” could lead “the western
world, the free world” to forfeit its “freedom and liberty,” to lose its
democracy, and “begin to militarize our country in order to avoid a repeat of another
mass-casualty event, ... to potentially unravel the fabric of our Constitution.”
Over half a
century ago, Supreme Court Justice Robert
Jackson concluded that “by giving way to
the passion, intolerance and suspicions of wartime, it is easy to reduce our
liberties to a shadow, often in answer to exaggerated claims of security.”.
That day is here.
Not only
are we under constant surveillance, but
take for example the kill list. A
list which began under the Bush administration as a rationale for murdering
suspect citizens of countries with which the United States was not at war has
become Obama’s kill list and the scope of the list has been expanded to include
the execution, without due process of law, of U.S. citizens accused, without
evidence presented in court, of association with terrorism. And this is accepted by the people. No
protests.
The Framers of the Constitution recognized such dangers
when they carefully subordinated the military to civilian authority and
attempted to limit the power of the President to initiate war.
Gregory
Foster, a former Army officer and West Point graduate who now teaches national
security studies at the National Defense University in Washington
said that principle of civilian control of the military—an early building block
of American democracy- has become
the civilian subjugation to the
military.
Today, the
degree to which society’s institutions,
policies, behavior, thought, and values are devoted to military power and
shaped by war are alarming.
The incursion of military recruiters and teachings into
the public school system is well known.
Presidents favor speaking to captive audiences at military bases,
defense bases, and on aircraft carriers.
Lawmakers’ constant use of
“support our troops” to justify defense spending. TV
programs and video games like “NCIS,” “Homeland” and “Call of Duty,” to reality
show
“Stars Earn Stripes,” demonstrate that Americans are subjected to a daily diet
of stories that valorize the military while the storytellers pursue their own
opportunistic political and commercial agendas
Former secretary of
defense Donald Rumsfeld acknowledged publicly in an October 24, 2003, interview
in the Washington Times: “We are in a war
of ideas, as well as a global war on terror. Ideas are important, and they need
to be marshaled, and they need to be communicated in ways that are persuasive
to the listeners.”
This was part
of his Information Operations Roadmap. As
part of the plan, public affairs
officers were given the task of briefing journalists. In 2005 it came to light that the Pentagon
paid the Lincoln Group (a private company) to plant ‘hundreds of stories’ in
Iraqi papers in support of U.S. Policies
But now, we see
that this war has been internalized, whether you look at drones, kill list, or
militarization of the police force.
During the Clinton administration, Congress passed what’s now known as the “1033 Program,” which formalized Reagan administration’s directive to the Pentagon to share surplus military gear with domestic police agencies. Since then, millions of pieces of military equipment designed for use on a battlefield have been transferred to local cops—SWAT teams and others—including machine guns, tanks, armored personnel carriers, etc.
The Pentagon’s 1033 program has exploded under Obama.
Bill Clinton also created the “Troops to Cops” program which offered grants to police departments who hired soldiers returning from battle, contributing even further to the militarization of the police force.
In a 2005 PBS documentary, David Grossman, a retired US Army Lt. Colonel spoke of training law enforcement groups worldwise to kill: “most of what I do is I train military and law enforcement in what I call the bulletproof mind.” “Prior preparation is that one variable in the equation that we can control ahead of time, and one of the key things is embracing the responsibility to kill. So when I teach, one of the things I believe we need to do is embrace this word “kill.””
Is it any
wonder that [Mayor] Bloomberg proudly bragged of “hav(ing) my
own army in the NYPD” and who used that army to spy on
peaceful Occupy Wall Street protestors?
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