Our Police State

Rubicon in the Rear-View, Part I: Militarizing the Police

Lewrockwell.com
by William Norman Grigg
October 6, 2008


There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them.

~ Garet Garrett, The Revolution Was (1938)

The seamless integration of the military and law enforcement into a single "Internal Security Force" is the defining characteristic of a fully realized police state. Once this fusion is accomplished, the question becomes not "whether" a police state exists, but rather how acute its institutional violence against the subject population will become.

That condition now exists in the country that still calls itself – without any apparent irony – the United States of America.

Much alarm has been raised over the admittedly alarming news that beginning October 1, the U.S. Army's Northern Command will deploy a specialized, combat-tested unit as an "on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks."

This "dwell-time" domestic deployment of the 3rd Infantry Division's 1st Brigade Combat Team will permit its soldiers to "use some of the [skills] they acquired in the war zone" to deal with "civil unrest and crowd control or to deal with potentially horrific scenarios such as massive poisoning and chaos in response to a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive, or CBRNE, attack."

In the context of our descent into rank imperial corruption, this small but significant development could be seen by some as the moment our rulers crossed the Rubicon. But that metaphorical boundary has been in our rear-view mirror for quite some time. Admittedly, there is something quite ominous about the news that "homeland tours" are expected to become a routine part of the rotation of soldiers tasked to carry out missions for those who command Washington's Empire.

The Homeland Security apparatus is a recombinant organism, engineered from multiple strands of institutional authoritarianism.

The process began in earnest in the late 1960s with the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration; the chimera has grown in power and malignancy because of the generation-long, trillion-dollar exercise in murderous cynicism called the "War on Drugs."

Indeed, it was in the context of this "war" that exceptions began to be carved out of the Posse Comitatus Act, which was intended to prevent the fusion of military and law enforcement functions within the United States. The cultivation of a huge population of official informants added another critical element to the metastasizing organism of official tyranny.

The Drug War likewise introduced Americans to the variety of official larceny called "civil asset forfeiture," through which police and Sheriff's departments nation-wide were turned into roving bands of officially protected highway robbers. The corruption of local law enforcement into federal welfare whores was an indispensable step toward the synthesis of a distinctly American police state.

Although we're constantly told that "everything changed" on September 11, the actual impact of The Day That (Supposedly) Changed Everything was to add a highly potent nutrient into the growth medium in which the Beast was already flourishing. This merely accelerated a process that was already well advanced.

Consider, as just one illustration, a series of Presidential Decision Directives, issued by Bill Clinton in his second term, that deal with the integration of the military with civilian law enforcement to deal with terrorist incidents involving Weapons of Mass Destruction or catastrophic natural disasters.

Apart from a few hidebound constitutionalists and easily-maligned Y2K "alarmists," nobody objected to this new intimacy between the military and civilian police. Then again, nobody had become concerned over the proliferation of military-trained SWAT and tactical teams, or the creation, in 1995, of the Pentagon's Law Enforcement Support Organization (LESO), through which police and Sheriff's departments could receive military hardware of any kind they desired at concessionary prices, "as if they were a DoD [Department of Defense] organization," in the words of the program's official pitchman.

The results of this ... well, call it a "guided evolution" of the law enforcement system, were entirely predictable.

"I served in the U.S. military and after I got out I ended up becoming a cop in 2002," recalls Bill, who was Battalion Soldier of the Year in 1999 and "Top Gun" in his police academy class. Bill shared his experiences in reaction to a podcast I recently did with Lew Rockwell examining the emergence of America's unitary, militarized Homeland Security state.

At the time he joined the force, many of the veterans "were old school, having started in law enforcement before I was born. They were tough but fair. They treated people with respect."

However, the "old school" officers "were forced out of the department [and it] took on a military feel," Bill continues. "You were expected to take [a] ..just follow orders and obey the [department administration attitude], no matter what, regardless if it was constitutional or not. The amount of force used during arrests went through the roof."

This militarized mindset – the notion that the job of police was to compel "civilians" to submit to state authority – had a tangible impact in terms of the promiscuous use of the "non-lethal" Taser weapon.

"When I first started we had a couple M26 Tasers of we needed them, but most people either left them at the PD or in their patrol cars," Bill relates. They were useful in a handful of instances involving armed, deranged people, and when used in those circumstances "they do save lives." However, once the Taser was in use, police started to use them as instruments of "pain compliance": "Anytime anyone did anything that was not compliant, out came the Taser."

"The tactics the SWAT team was using were also becoming more like the military," Bill laments. "We even got a military Humvee. We were now wearing BDUs and carrying fully automatic machine guns and wearing the same body armor as soldiers were in Iraq. All of our 870 Remington shotguns were removed from the patrol cars and replaced with full-automatic H&K-made G36 machine guns – to the protest of all the patrol officers, mind you. If anyone spoke out they were ..dealt with.' In the course of 3 years they went through over 50 patrol officers. And this is a department with only about 47 officers total."

While military hardware was being forced on recalcitrant officers, those willing to carry out their assigned roles were being used to disarm civilians as the opportunity presented itself:

"People were having their weapons confiscated for ..safe keeping' during traffic stops. [My home state] is a rural state that relies heavily on hunting for income. Everyone has a gun here. Even my 88-year-old grandma carries one in her purse (yes, she has a CC permit). So to take someone's guns you had better have a damn good reason, not just because they have a gun in their car and it's after 9 PM."

After witnessing this long train of official abuses, "many of us spoke out." Those who did so "were then run through the cleaners." Bill recounts an effort by the department administration to extort perjured testimony from him against a shift Sergeant who had condemned the department's corruption. Those who spoke out against corruption – which included prosecutors and judges – "were either fired unlawfully or quit."

In August 2007, after five and a half years on the force, Bill finally reached his frustration threshold and quit.

The sinkhole of dictatorial abuse and Sicilian corruption described by Bill is a small community in South Dakota – that haven of sober Midwestern rectitude whose citizens aren't afflicted with a state income tax. If it's this bad in the green wood, what's it like in the dry? Well, according to Bill, "these abuses do, sadly, happen in almost every town in America."

The process Bill describes is a peculiar type of alembic, distilling the worst elements from a recruiting pool to serve in local police forces. Rather than retaining people of character and principle, the process selects for the officious, the self-satisfied, the opportunistic, and especially for those fixated on power.

Martin, who likewise shared his experience in reaction to the Lew Rockwell podcast, is a former Marine. As he was processed out of the Corps he was pitched by a recruiter for the LAPD. Although he had no interest in the job, he was interested – and more than a bit alarmed – by what he learned about the ease with which former military personnel can become "civilian" police, and the eagerness of the LAPD to absorb military veterans into its ranks.

Recruiters "told us how they'd worked with command elements so that a Marine could go through LAPD academy while still in the service – meaning a seamless transition to police work from military life," Martin reports. Probably the "scariest" element of military recruitment, Martin says, is that "for basic officer positions a series of mental testing and psychological testing was not necessary. It is feasible for a Marine to get back to the states from a deployment to Iraq, get out of the military, and then start patrolling the streets of LA in a matter of a few months."

"Police work is the easiest and most lucrative thing for a former Marine or military person to transfer to, especially us infantry kids who received no real job training while in the military," Martin concludes. "To us police work is the closest civilian equivalent of the patrolling that we did in Iraq. I think it is safe to assume that the more ..grunts' we make and give combat experience the more militarized our police departments will become."

Running through this entire story we can find a microscopically thin thread of hope in the reluctance of at least some military and police personnel to serve the Regime's apparatus of repression. But the generational trends Bill describes will only grow worse as a law enforcement assimilates veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have on the mindset of tomorrow's police recruits.

In his fascinating Iraq war account Generation Kill, Evan Wright describes his experiences as a reporter embedded in one of the first Marine units to invade Iraq in 2003. One lieutenant, describing the "Gen X" and "Gen Y" youngsters fighting in Iraq, observed that during World War II, when the Marines hit the beaches in the Pacific campaign, "a surprisingly high percentage of them didn't fire their weapons, even when faced with direct enemy contact. Not these guys. Did you see what they did to that town? They f*****g destroyed it. These guys have no problem with killing."

No problem with killing.
Our sin nature notwithstanding, any typical human being has exceptionally strong inhibitions where taking another life is concerned. This internal restraint can be subverted by a process of self-seduction in the service of some illicit design; it can be undermined by severe emotional or psychological trauma. For those in the military, it is nullified through patient, deliberate indoctrination – and even then, the psychological impediment to homicide still re-asserts itself for many in the military.

But "Generation Kill" includes more than a few young men produced by a deeply nihilistic popular culture who have exceptionally few compunctions about killing. When they are recruited into law enforcement, they will retain both the mindset and muscle-memory of trained, remorseless killers.


William Norman Grigg [send him mail at WNGrigg@msn.com] writes the Pro Libertate blog.

Copyright © 2008 William Norman Grigg

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Setting a "LEO" Straight

by L. Neil Smith
lneil@netzero.com
For Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership http://www.jpfo.org

Dear Sir:

I am in receipt of your May 17 letter to Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, in response to my column about the National Rifle Association and its collusion with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. (See "With Friends Like The NRA ..." http://www.jpfo.org/smith/smith-friends-like-nra.htm ). I thank you for taking the time and going to the effort of expressing your concerns, but I'm afraid you have some misconceptions about the nature of individual rights in general and the individual right to own and carry weapons in particular.

You begin by complaining that the article in question is "too radical even for me". "Radical" comes from the Greek, from their word for "root" ("radish" is a related word). In English, it means getting to the root of whatever you're talking about, to the fundamentals, the basics, which is, indeed, what I try to do with all my writing.

I'm sure you meant that what I said is too extreme, a word that depends ..: extreme compared to what? In this case it seems that it's extreme compared, not to what the Second Amendment actually provides, but what you'd rather believe it does. A firm believer in the strict interpretation of the Second Amendment would not go on to say the other things you do about the rights it was written to preserve. But perhaps I can help.

"I don't feel the need," you inform us, "for law-abiding and honest citizens to own and carry fully automatic weapons, especially those capable of concealment, along with sawed-off shotguns." Pardon me if I point out that it couldn't possibly be less important what you do or don't "feel the need" for. I don't care what you "feel", nor would James Madison who wrote the Bill of Rights, nor would Thomas Jefferson whom it was written to satisfy.

Clearly, you fail to understand why the Second Amendment was written. While it's become popular to say it has nothing to do with duck hunting -- and that's true as far as it goes -- very few people understand that it has nothing to do with defending yourself from muggers, burglars, or rapists, either, although that's a surely welcome side-benefit.

The Second Amendment was written specifically to ensure that the people would always possess the physical means to intimidate the government, to keep it in line, or, failing that, to overthrow it at need and, as Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, "provide new guards for their future security".

In its time, the Pennsylvania (or Kentucky) rifle represented the leading edge of technology, and those who possessed it could shoot three times as far, with much greater accuracy, than those stuck with, say, the British Army's "Brown Bess" smoothbore musket. Jefferson, an inventor and a technophile himself, would recognize the need today for the average citizen to be equipped with weapons that are the equal of, or superior to, whatever the government supplies its troops with.

Now if that doesn't include "automatic weapons, especially those capable of concealment, along with sawed-off shotguns," I don't know what it does include. You can't make the government behave itself with bolt action rifles, pump shotguns, and revolvers. You also say, "We don't need to have explosives and other weapons of war readily available to anyone that wants them or the U.S. would be like the countries in the middle east we are attempting to defend."

Yet "weapons of war" (a term often used as propaganda by the likes of Sarah Brady and Dianne Feinstein) are precisely why the Second Amendment was written, and, once again, what you feel "we" do or don't need is completely unimportant. You have no legitimate say in the matter. The police are the standing army that the Founding Fathers worried about, and, as such, they're the very people the Second Amendment was ratified to protect us from.

If 200 years of American history have anything to teach us, it's that so-called "public servants" are neither. Their loyalty is not to the public, but to the politically powerful. All too soon they come to see themselves as the public's masters, not servants. Maybe that's part of their strange transformation over the years from keepers of the peace into "law enforcement officers". We've gotten to a point where they'll enforce any damn law -- no matter how evil or idiotic it is -- without regard to whether it serves the public and the peace or damages them.

To quote you further, "I guess what I am trying to say is the United States is a country of laws to safeguard the population from the criminal element of our society." Wrong again: how can this be a country of laws if the Bill of Rights -- especially the Second Amendment -- can be ignored or reinterpreted into meaninglessness by the government?

That's how the Canadian "Charter of Rights and Freedoms" works. Nothing in it is absolute, it fails to protect the right to property in any way, and it can be suspended whenever the government feels like it.

Are we Canadians?

The "criminal element of our society" we should worry about are elected and appointed officials who've decided that either the Founding Fathers didn't really mean what they said, that it somehow doesn't apply today (interestingly, even the Left hasn't made that claim much over the past seven years of the Bush Administration), or that we're all too stupid to read some kind of secret code they wrote into the law, empowering tyrants to take our rights away whenever they "feel the need".

"I can only imagine if all the current gun laws were abolished how the crime rate would [soar]." Given the incontrovertible fact that the better armed people are, the less crime there is, a soaring crime rate would indeed be totally imaginary. Liberals whimper about just such an imaginary soaring crime rate whenever it gets easier for individuals to own and carry weapons. I suggest that you read More Guns, Less Crime by Professor John Lott if you have any doubts on the subject.

I have to add that your phrase "legally purchased firearm" is offensive to anyone who believes that begging the government for permission to own a gun, or informing it that you have one, defeats the purpose of the Second Amendment. Any individual should be free to walk into any store, gun show, or yard sale and buy a gun for cash, without signing a paper or even giving anyone their name. That's what the Founders intended; that's how it was most places until 1968; that's what we must strive for. To paraphrase the great Alphonso Bedoya, in Treasure of the Sierra Madre, "We don' need no stinkin' legalized!"

Not too much later on, you assert that, " ... if you get rid of the [BATFE] their duties and personnel would be absorbed by other Federal agencies. Getting rid of a name does not help anyone. Federal law enforcement agencies have their place ... "

On the contrary, we seek not only to abolish the BATFE, but all of its functions, as well, since not one is legal under the Constitution. Alcohol and tobacco (however much some people may disapprove of their use) are subject to religiously-based punitive "sin taxes" that are completely out of place in a nation with a First Amendment in its Constitution. They violate the letter and spirit of the Fourteenth Amendment, as well, since it guarantees equal protection under the law -- protection that smokers, drinkers, and gun people never actually receive.

Furthermore, there's no Constitutional justification for the existence of any of the agencies you think might pick up BATFE's workload. (See Article 1, Section 8, a short, extremely explicit list of powers permissable to the government -- a list that does not include creating anything even remotely like the EPA, OSHA, FBI, NSA, DHS, or CIA.) If you wish to live in a "country of laws" it must be a country of all the laws, especially highest law of the land, the Bill of Rights.

You begin again, "I believe that all law-abiding citizens should be allowed to carry a firearm and -- "

Please get this through your head once and for all: regarding the individual right to own and carry weapons, there is no "allowed". Government has nothing to say about it. This basic human right predates the Second Amendment (which only offers to protect it). It predates the Constitution. It predates the United States. It predates the British and the Roman empires. It predates civilization itself.

Undaunted by the laws you profess to respect, you trudge onward: "Concealed weapons permits should be good throughout the United States, however, I do believe there should be some type of proficiency qualification requirement ... every 3 to 5 years if not annually." Apparently I missed the part of the Second Amendment that says, "the right of the people who have permits and pass some type of proficiency qualification to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

"I understand JPFO's positions on firearms given the history of the Jewish people and what has happened to them ... This will never happen in this country unless the government is willing to kill those of us that will fight to the death before giving up our guns and for this reason, I do not feel they will try."

Maybe this is a little harsh, but exactly whose fantasy world are you living in? This is the age of Waco, of Ruby Ridge, of the Texas FLDS child kidnappings. It's an age in which a United States Senator, Thomas Dodd, can get the Library of Congress to translate Nazi gun laws -- written to satisfy Hitler the way the Bill of Rights was written to satisfy Jeffersom -- so he could turn them into the Gun Control Act of 1968.

It's the age of secret detention centers -- concentration camps -- the seizure of private weapons as part of "helping" disaster victims, and the imposition of a North American Union that would circumvent and destroy the Bill of Rights, erase the borders between this country and Mexico and Canada, and force Americans to use "Ameros" for money instead of dollars.

See: http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=52684

The government now snatches people off the street and out of their homes, ships them without due process to Guantanamo Bay and other places for unlimited periods of time, and tortures them. Your bland assurances that "it can't happen here" ring a bit hollow, since it is happening here, right now. Only this time, everybody gets to be a Jew.

See the following:

http://search.freefind.com/find.html?id=6283468&pid=r&mode=ALL&query=nau&SUBMIT=+Find%21+&t=s

http://search.freefind.com/find.html?oq=detention&id=6283468&pageid=r&_charset_=UTF-8&bcd=%C3%B7&scs=1&query=detention+center&Find=Search&mode=ALL&search=all

You say: "We must continue the watchdog approach on all new legislation and be very vocal on bills that attempt to further constrict our 'Right to Keep and Bear Arms' along with any legislation that constricts other Constitutional rights," you tell us. "Our best hope is return conservatives to the House, Senate, and Presidency."

You go on at considerable length about "conservative principles" and a need to elect and appoint conservatives anywhere and everywhere. You seem to have missed the fact that it's your precious conservatives and their so-called "principles" that have brought us to the end of the American dream of peace, freedom, prosperity, and progress. It's interesting to me that novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand predicted developments like these over forty years ago.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand.

It's your precious conservatives who wage unconstitutional wars, lock up individuals who are supposed to be presumed innocent until they're proven guilty, deprive them of legal representation, and treat them in ways it's illegal to treat animals.

It's your precious conservatives who rammed the fascistic Patriot Act through Congress, who conduct illegal, warrantless wiretaps, who continue the medieval practice of Eminent Domain, and champion the mass invasion of privacy at airports.

It's your precious conservatives' irrational insistence on gun control -- victim disarmament -- at any cost that prevents passengers from shooting hijackers before they can crash planes into buildings. Your precious conservatives would rather shoot down a hijacked plane loaded with innocent people, than let those people exercise their basic human right to self-defense.

In short, it's your precious conservatives -- right wing socialists who have turned out to be no better than the left wing socialists who call themselves liberals -- who are leading the government's campaign to destroy the Bill of Rights.

When German "law enforcement officers" did this to their own people they protested that they were "only following orders" -- but we hanged them anyway, at Nuremberg. In my experience most cops' highest loyalty is to their pensions, rather than the people they claim to serve, an attitude that makes all kinds of oppression -- including genocide -- possible. See JPFO's gun control/genocide chart at http://www.jpfo.org/filegen-a-m/deathgc.htmdgc

I urge you to read Melissa Marsh's review of Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher R. Browning, then obtain and read the book itself: . "If the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 could become killers under such circumstances, what group of men cannot?" says Browning, trying to understand and explain why people can be led to do anything, no matter how depraved. "Human responsibility is ultimately an individual matter."

I am speaking to you, now, of your individual responsibility. I truly wonder what Second Amendment -- and what Constitution -- you believe in. It certainly isn't the one that I know and love, that the colonists and veterans after them fought and bled and died for. It's time to look straight into the ugly face of history and acquaint yourself unflinchingly with the truth.

A cop should not cop out.

Sincerely,

L. Neil Smith

==========================================================================
"Men cannot be governed and remain men. Domesticate the wolf and he changes both physically and mentally. His muzzle shrinks, his teeth diminish, he loses size, speed, and strength, He grows spots. His ears flop. His brain withers. He becomes a dog. Men are on the verge of becoming dogs -- the changes are underway already -- unless we do something to stop it."

-- The Ceo Lia Wheeler, Phoebus Krumm, forthcoming

Four-time Prometheus Award-winner L. Neil Smith has been writing about guns and gun ownership for more than 30 years. He is the author of 27 books, the most widely-published and prolific libertarian novelist in the world, and is considered an expert on the ethics of self-defense. His writings may be seen on the following sites:

The Webley Page: http://www.lneilsmith.org

The Libertarian Enterprise: http://www.ncc-1776.org

The Probability Broach: The Graphic Novel, Roswell, Texas, and TimePeeper (August 2007): http://www.bigheadpress.com

LNS at Random (blog): http://www.bigheadpress.com/lneilsmith/

Find other articles by L. Neil Smith: http://www.jpfo.org/filegen-a-m/lneilsmith.htm

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