Resistnwo-News 6 - Swat Teams
James Traficant
April 30, 2010 |
Photo Credit: NewsCorpse.com
The story surfaces nationally with a surreal Glenn Beck
segment and two ludicrous Fox News discussions
highlighting the false claim that Brandeis University
was hosting an international conference linking the
Tea Party movement to Nazis in Europe. The conference,
which took place yesterday, revealed the entire
propaganda campaign was a hoax, but not before
anguished Holocaust survivors, conservative Jews
in the Tea Party movement, and others had deluged
Brandeis University with complaints.
Now it seems that the story emerged as part of a Fox News campaign to defend the diverse and complicated Tea Party movement from evidence that its supporters include a significant contingent of White people who harbor racial resentment against Blacks and Latinos/Latinas.
For the original Brandeis story on Fox News reporters relied on the claims of a single local Boston Tea Party advocate and conservative talk radio shock jock, Michael Graham, for its information. So Fox News featured the offensive hoax based on biased hearsay, unsubstantiated supposition, and a misreading of the conference program by a person who is a Tea Party supporter
The Glenn Beck segment drifted farther away from facts and logic.
Glenn Beck segment:
3:20 Brandeis conference denounced
6:00 Beck tells viewers to contact Brandeis
As Media Matters for America observed, apparently the most significant aspect of the story for Beck was that the university was named after the late Jewish scholar and Supreme Court justice, Louis D. Brandeis. For Beck, wrote a Media Matters researcher, the "Brandeis University symposium on political extremism is suspect because Louis Brandeis was in [Woodrow] Wilson's cabinet;" the quip accompanies a link to that portion of Beck's tirade which skirted on the thin ice of classic antisemitic conspiracy claims about manipulation of politics by powerful elite Jews.
Since I was a conference participant, and part of the hoax was based on the title of my paper, "From Tea Parties to Armed Militias," I am writing this from a personal perspective. And am I pissed off? You betcha!
Unlike Fox News and the right-wing blogosphere, some people actually contacted me before the conference and fact-checked the claims. Not Graham, who wrote an op-ed in the Boston Herald repeating his false claims.
My conference paper, which clearly stated that I did not think that Tea Party activists were Nazis, was presented at an interdisciplinary conference coordinated by the Brandeis Center for German and European Studies. The conference title was "New Right-Wing Radicalism: A Transatlantic Perspective." A range of scholars with demonstrable expertise on the subject from Europe and United States were invited.
When Brandeis realized the conference program was being misinterpreted, it issued the following statement:
On April 28, the Center for German and European Studies at Brandeis University is hosting a conference on the rise of right-wing radicalism.
The event, which features speakers from a variety of universities and institutions, focuses on developments in Europe, including the rise of neo-Nazi and anti-semitic groups. It also includes discussion of a wide range of movements and activities in the United States, from the extreme and violent to the Tea Party, as a point of comparison.
The logo created for the conference showed a swastika inside the international symbol of negation, reflecting the legitimate concern people feel over the activities, often violent, of neo-Nazi extremists.
Unfortunately, this logo created an impression that Brandeis and the conference organizers equated a range of organizations, including the Tea Party in the United States, with extremist groups on both continents.
That was not the intention of the faculty, staff or students of the University who were involved in creating the conference, and Brandeis regrets the unintended association and pain this caused. The logo has been removed from the event page promoting the conference
So Brandeis understood that the agony for Holocaust survivors caused by the hoax media claims required a revised graphic and an apology. Good for Brandeis. No apologies yet from Fox News for not bothering to fact-check the allegations before misrepresenting the Brandeis program on national television and spawning a storm of controversy on the right-wing side of the Internet.
After the conference Fox News continued to beat the dead horse droppings of their manufactured story. They featured Graham, who is publicizing himself by contacting other conservative outlets such as Accuracy in Media and highlighting his role in publicizing what he calls a scandal and I call a hoax.
Fox News is using the Brandeis controversy to insulate the Tea Parties from increasing media coverage of racism and xenophobia within the movement. I reviewed the racial bias in the Tea Parties in my Brandeis presentation yesterday.
On their first story about the Brandeis conference Fox News sandbagged NPR commentator Juan Williams who was asked to comment on the charge that the Tea Party activists were Nazis. Not surprisingly Williams thought the charge was outlandish. It is. It is also a hoax. Williams should be more alert to the idea that Fox News would exploit William's skin color as a way to dismiss increasing evidence of racial bias in the movement.
Victor Goode on RaceWire, the Colorlines Blog, summarized a New York Times poll that "shows that while their most important concern is the economy, they often view this issue through the lens of racially tinted glasses."
The University of Washington Institute for the Study of Ethnicity, Race & Sexuality has released a study that shows the "tea party is not just about politics and size of government. The data suggests it may also be about race" study author Christopher Parker, explained. The study asked questions about the trustworthiness and intelligence of Black and Latino/Latina people in the United States, and showed that Tea Party supporters are significantly more prone to prejudice, than those who oppose the movement.
According to a University press release:
Indeed, strong support for the tea party movement results in
a 45 percent decline in support for health care reform compared
with those who oppose the tea party. "While it's clear that the
tea party in one sense is about limited government, it's also
clear from the data that people who want limited government
don't want certain services for certain kinds of people. Those
services include health care,"Parker said.
Some defenders of the Tea Parties go so far as to claim the
movement is not on the political right at all. David A Graham
on the Newsweek Web site has put together a photo essay
depicting similar historic conservative movements. According
to Graham, "the United States has a long tradition of reactionary,
conservative, populist movements, dating back to before the
Civil War. Many of them included racial or ethnic prejudice and
hostility toward immigrants.
The second Fox News program on the Brandeis affair, after the
conference, attempted to divert attention away from the potential
anti-immigrant trends in the Tea Parties. One recent Tea Party
event featured anti-immigrant Machiavellian mastermind Tom
Tancredo--a notorious bigot and racist. The former Colorado
Representative Tom Tancredo told a Tea Party rally in South
Carolina that Obama should be sent back to Africa.
One of the core themes of Beck and Fox News is that fascism is a left-wing movement. The subject came up at the Brandeis conference, and one of the German scholars observed that while it was undeniably true that national socialists led by Gregor Strasser played an important role in the Nazi Party, the 1934 Röhm-Putsch (aka the Night of the Long Knives), terminated the revolutionary socialist agenda of the Nazi Party. He said, however, it was generally accepted that German Nazism was a right-wing movement.
I was part of a group of scholars asked by the History News Network to review Jonah Goldberg's book, Liberal Fascism, and all of us thought the claims and analysis in the book were unsubstantiated, and contradicted the majority scholarship.
The discussion of the role of angry middle-class right-wing populist movements intersecting with opportunistic politicians and media demagogues to facilitate the formation of fascist and neo fascist movements is well studied in scholarly literature. But hyperbolic claims from the political Left that the Tea Party movement itself is a Nazi movement flow from deeply inaccurate and superficial perceptions about the nature of fascism and the actual attitudes within the Tea Party movement.
There is, however, a set of dynamics that the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as "Rage on the Right," that involves the Patriot Movement, the Militias, Anti-immigrant groups, and the Ultra Right including neonazis.
In recent months a number of progressive scholars and journalists have opened up a discussion about these dynamics, most recently Noam Chomsky, but preceded by Sara Robinson, David Neiwert, author of The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right.
This is not the same as denouncing the Tea Party movement as Nazis. It is a comparative analysis of the role of right-wing populist movements in Germany during the Weimar regime, and the role they played in the decision of elite faction in Germany to give power to Hitler to solve the "crisis;" but also to block the growing power of socialist and communist parties and movements.
That's not the situation in the U.S. today. The Tea Party movement is not on the verge of joining the tiny "groupuscule" of neonazis in our country. It is far more likely they will pull the Republican Party further to the right -- chased by the Democrats led by deluded spin doctors who apparently control what passes for Democratic Party strategy built around snidely deriding the Tea Party activists as ignorant and lunatic "wing-nuts."
Of course like all populist social movements on the right or left, the Tea Party could collapse in a few months, or merge into a revitalized Republican Party, or splinter into segments built around libertarianism, xenophobic anti-immigrant activism, Gun Rights, anti-Muslim fears, and the Christian Right gender-drive social agenda of pushing gay people back into the closet and forcing women into back alleys for abortions. Nobody knows for sure.
Shock Jock Graham apparently missed the parts of my presentation dealing with why a comparative analysis of how the Tea Party, Town Hall, and Militia movements interact in a dynamic way with the Republican Party on one side and organized insurgent ultra-right movements on the other side. He might have picked up one of the diagrams I distributed at the conference, but if so, he apparently missed the point. (this version is from 2009, as it shows how long I have used this analytical lens mentioning the reformist and dissident Tea Party movement as situated between the reformist Conservative Right and the Insurgent Ultra Right including neonazis.
I have also explained the dynamic of how angry right-wing populism can lead to aggression and violence, especially against people of color and immigrants, on Religion Dispatches, and in the Progressive magazine in a February cover story titled Taking Tea Partiers Seriously."
Since Graham apparently has not bothered to actually read any of my work, or else he simply ignores its content. So here is the text from the end of my Brandeis conference paper:
...Fascism exploits anger and frustration and directs it into demonization and scapegoating; creating a potential for aggression and violence that in the worst case scenario can end in genocide.
The work of Fritzsche and others on voting patterns in Weimar Germany demonstrates that in the late 1920s Hitler's Nazi Party was able to exploit the fears of exasperated middle class voters by promising to fix a broken economic and political system.
After the First World War Yeats wrote in his poem "The Second Coming" :
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold...
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Most right-wing populist movements never become fascist, and most fascist movements never gain state power; but the turmoil created in these volatile periods can undermine civil society, and harm the individuals targeted as scapegoats.
Even if you think my presentation is hogwash, please understand that no one at Brandeis and no panelist here today, including me, ever meant to suggest that the Tea Party movement was the equivalent of the Nazi Party. We all thought that was obvious.
A simple Internet search would have demonstrated that I have repeatedly condemned the trivialization, mockery, and name-calling aimed at the participants in the Tea Party movement.
For media demagogues to exploit the agony of the Holocaust for political gain and to attract personal attention is offensive to this audience, the Brandeis community, Jews around the world, and every decent person on this planet.
You may disagree with everything I said here today, but know that the point of conferences like this is to ensure we have learned the horrible lessons of the Nazi genocide, and continuously explore it from a variety of perspectives. And I hope all of us here today can agree on one point... Never Again!
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This post is my personal rant (see, for example going Santelli) . It does not in any way represent the views of my employer, my freelance editors, or the many subversive pinko human rights groups to which I belong or support as a board member or advisor.
More on right-wing populism is here
"Corporations are not people. Money is not speech." These are fundamental truths that our nation needs to remember -- and add to the Constitution.
May 1, 2010 |
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A rogue Supreme Court seems hellbent on establishing a
corporate oligarchy. Congress can’t stop it. Every time
Congress or state legislatures tries to curb the power
of billionaires or mega corporations the Court slaps
them down.
Citizens United v. FEC, the recent Supreme Court
decision that allowed corporations to spend unlimited
sums of money to influence elections is only the most
recent step in this process. There will be more. But
the shocking decision may be sufficient to galvanize
a political movement that can change the rules and
ensure our democracy.
We can save our country by adding eight words to the
fundamental law of the land, the US Constitution. "Corporations are not persons. " "Money is not speech."
Such a development is not without precedent. Once before a political movement has changed the Constitution to nurture democracy. The populist uprising of the late 20th century led to the passage, in rapid succession of the 16th Amendment in 1913 that allowed for an income tax, the 17th Amendment, ratified the same year that required the direct election of Senators and in 1920 the 19th Amendment that gave women the right to vote.
A campaign to strip corporations of personhood would have a similar populist and popular appeal. A recent Quinnipiac poll reveals a whopping 79 percent public disapproval of the Court’s ruling. A Washington Post-ABC News poll puts the figure even higher at 81 percent. And as Dan Eggen of the Post writes, "The poll reveals relatively little difference of opinion on the issue among Democrats (85 percent opposed to the ruling), Republicans (76 percent) and independents (81 percent)."
But win or lose, a campaign against corporate personhood would allow us to regain control of a narrative we lost in 1980 when Ronald Reagan declared in his Inaugural Address, "government is the problem" and initiated a process that has resulted in the greatest concentration of private wealth and power in American history.
People may not know exactly what Goldman Sachs is, but they know it is not a person. A person doesn’t have unlimited life or limited liability. A person is responsible for her decisions. If she makes a decision that kills or maims people she will go to jail. If a CEO makes such a decision she, at worst, receives a golden parachute.
Unlike a real person, a corporation lacks a conscience. It is guided neither by ethics nor morality but rather by laws that required its Boards to elevate the maximization of profits above all other concerns.
A real person is an independent actor, subject to many influences that affect how he votes. Warren Buffett, for example, thinks it is in his and society’s best interest for him to be required to pay more taxes. A corporation that made this decision could be taken to court by its stockholders.
In his The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith’s first, and in his own mind more important work than Wealth of Nations, he outlined his view of the institutions that make men virtuous. He focused on the inherent human qualities of gratitude and sympathy and empathy that lead to a merging of our self-interest with the public good. To Adam Smith, that was the real invisible hand. A corporation lacks sympathy or empathy although occasionally it might express gratitude in the form of increased financial contributions to politicians who do its bidding.
President Barack Obama will today visit the Gulf of Mexico coastline threatened by the giant oil spill, as experts warn that the spill from a ruptured oil rig might be growing five times faster than previously estimated.
The oil is gushing from BP's sunken Deepwater Horizon rig at 25,000 barrels a day and could reach 50,000 barrels a day, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Earlier estimates had put the leak at 5,000 barrels a day.
Professor Ian MacDonald, an ocean specialist at Florida State University, said the new estimate suggested that the leak had already spread 9 million gallons of heavy crude oil across the Gulf. This compares with 11 million that leaked from the Exxon Valdez tanker when it hit a reef off Alaska in 1989.
Hans Gruber, a Miami University researcher, said that satellite images of the slick on Friday showed that it was three time bigger than estimated, covering an area of 3,500 sq miles (9,000 sq km), similar in size to Puerto Rico.
Oil spill disaster is now ‘out of control’
At the current estimated rate of leakage, it would take less than eight weeks for the huge spill to surpass the Exxon Valdez disaster.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said that deteriorating conditions on the sea bed could result in a flow of 50,000 barrels a day, sufficient to produce one of America’s worst ecological disasters
Experts and officials said that their greatest fear was that a disintegration of pipes close to the rig could produce an “unchecked gusher” that would ravage America’s southern coastline.
High winds and rough seas hampered efforts to prevent the slick from reaching the coastline on Saturday, raising fears that there was no way to protect the fragile wetlands of Louisiana and its neighbouring states.
While the leading edge of the slick appears to be little more than a sheen, Bobby Jindal, the Louisiana Governor, warned that the millions of gallons of crude being driven into shore by southeasterly winds formed a potential catastrophe.
"This spill threatens not only our wetlands and our fisheries, but also our way of life," Mr Jindal told reporters. "They originally thought we would see heavier oil hitting us today. They've pushed that back until tomorrow."
Environmentalists said it could take decades for the maze of marshes — more than 40 per cent of America's ecologically fragile wetlands — to recover if waves simply wash the oil over miles of boom set up to protect the coast.
"The surface area is huge," said Mark Floegel, a researcher with Greenpeace. "There probably isn't enough boom in the world to protect what needs to be protected."
Commandant Admiral Thad Allen of the US Coast Guard said the adverse weather conditions meant that a major shore impact was inevitable.
"There's enough oil out there, I think it's logical to assume that it will impact the shoreline. The question is when and where," he told reporters.
Meanwhile criticism of BP was intensifying for apparently underestimating the scale of the disaster.
The British oil giant faces questions over how much it knew about previous problems with “blowout preventers”, the giant underwater valves designed to shut down oil flow in the event of accidents.
The valves on the rig failed to work after it exploded on April 20. BP technicians have been unable to activate them even though they appear to be undamaged by the blast.
BP has calculated that it might take up to three months to sink a new well that could cut off the flow of the Deepwater Horizon’s oil.
The worst oil spill affecting US waters was caused by a 1979 blowout aboard the Ixtoc, a Mexican rig that discharged at least 130 million gallons, 600 miles south of the Texas coast. It took nine months to plug the leak.
Crews have been working with little success to stem the oil slick that has now grown to the size of Puerto Rico.
Removing oil from the surface by skimming it, burning it or dispersing it with chemicals has done little to stop the increasing oil slick, but solutions to stop it are on the way. BP's chairman blames a "failed piece of equipment" and that he can't say when the hole will be plugged.
They are trying to activate a "blowout preventer," a mechanism meant to seal off the gushing oil. "As you can imagine, it's like doing open-heart surgery at 5,000 feet, (in the dark) with robot controlled submarines," BP PLC chairman Lamar McKay said.
The blowout preventer was the main line of defense against this type of accident." It "seemed inconceivable" that it would fail. The blowout preventer is meant to activate (after a blast) to cut off spilling oil. The cause of the blast that killed 11 workers is still a mystery.
A 74-ton metal and concrete box could be placed over the well in the next six to eight days. Spokesmen for the company explained the oil would flow into the chamber and then be sucked through a tube into a tanker ship. The box will be 40 feet tall, 24 feet wide and 14 feet deep.
Video Clip Below
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Friday, April 30, 2010
Levin: SWAT Team Response To Oil Spill Is Government Takeover Plot
Radio talk show host and former Reagan cabinet advisor Mark Levin has slammed President Obama’s bizarre announcement that he will be sending SWAT teams to deal with the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, alleging that the response is part of a plan to grease the skids for government takeover and nationalization of the oil industry.
In a move that has shocked and dumbfounded political observers in equal measure, Obama said yesterday the “Department of Interior has announced that they will be sending SWAT teams to the Gulf to inspect all platforms and rigs.”
Obama has also dispatched Secretaries of Interior and Homeland Security as well as Administrator Lisa Jackson of the Environmental Protection Agency to the site “To ensure that BP and the entire U.S. government is doing everything possible, not just to respond to this incident, but also to determine its cause.”
Reacting to the announcement, Levin expressed his amazement that the Department of the Interior, which he worked under, even had SWAT teams.
evin labeled the response to the oil spill “a stunner,” asking, “What are these SWAT teams going to do….doesn’t this sound like Hugo Chavez to you – we have an environmental problem, we have a leak, and we’re sending SWAT teams to the platforms and the rigs – SWAT teams are not environmentalist experts, they’re not scientists, they’re not engineers, they’re law enforcement – so why are we sending SWAT teams to all the platforms and rigs in the Gulf of Mexico?”
Levin alleged that the response was a precursor to government nationalization of the oil industry via the back door. “I think those SWAT teams are there in coordination with the attorney general’s office, the Interior Department, Homeland Security, maybe the EPA….to seize records at these sites and to lay the foundation for more government takeover,” he stated.
Levin added that he was stunned with the media’s nonchalant reaction at Obama’s flagrant abuse of power.
“It just stuns me that we’re sending SWAT teams to all platforms and rigs, not ecological experts, not various scientific experts, not engineers – we’re sending SWAT Teams – we don’t even send SWAT teams to the border….you don’t send SWAT teams to rigs in the middle of an environmental problem,” he said.
Levin paraphrased Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel’s quote about a crisis representing an opportunity, suggesting that the administration is exploiting the accident for political gain.
Levin concluded by pointing out that no government action, regulation, or SWAT team is going to prevent accidents which are inevitable.
As Levin suggested, a move against offshore drilling by oil companies is already in motion. White House Senior Adviser David Axelrod told ABC News, “No additional drilling has been authorized, and none will until we find out what happened here and whether there was something unique and preventable here.”
Listen to the clip via You Tube below.
Imagine the national uproar if 200 Tea Partiers had gone on a rampage with burning torches
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Monday, May 3, 2010
Imagine the uproar if 200 Tea Party members had gone on a rampage
through a downtown city, smashing windows, starting fires, and spraying
graffiti everywhere, the corporate media would be all over it, and yet
gangs of pro-illegal immigration demonstrators do this and much worse
on a regular basis, with no national news coverage whatsoever.
“A large group of protesters demonstrating at a May Day rally for worker’s
and immigrant rights downtown broke off into a riot vandalizing about a
dozen businesses around 10:30 p.m. Saturday, police said,” reports The
Santa Cruz Sentinel.
An Associated Press report states that eighteen businesses were damaged
as pro-immigrants rights activists engaged in violent riots, spraying graffiti,
smashing windows, setting fire to shop fronts, and causing damage to a
cost of up to $100,000 dollars.
“The damage that was caused was without purpose,” Capt. Steve Clark said. “It was senseless violence that victimized a community who cannot afford to be victimized in this manner. This did nothing to add credit to whatever they believed their cause was.”
(ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW)
The riot followed the announcement that pro-amnesty demonstrators would march across the country on May 1st, which is also a date on which socialists rally worldwide to celebrate Communism, euphemistically labeled “International Workers Day” by the media.
In addition, during a pro-amnesty rally in San Francisco, 40 Golden Gate Minutemen, who were staging a peaceful counter-protest, were chased, beaten and injured by the pro-immigration thugs.
If Tea Partiers so much as dare to carry a vaguely inflammatory sign or shout at a lawmaker, they are nationally demonized by the corporate media as dangerous racist extremists and even domestic terrorists. And yet anarchists and pro-illegal immigrant demonstrators can run riot, engage in violence and cause monumental damage to private property and it barely even makes the news.
Watch the clip below. Despite the best efforts of ABC News to characterize the culprits solely as “anarchists” and not pro-illegal demonstrators, at the end of the clip, people in the background can be heard shouting “deport illegal immigrants,” making it clear who the business owners and residents held responsible for the damage.
As we have previously highlighted, despite media characterizations of anyone who opposes big government or illegal immigration as violent extremists, by far the most dangerous and violent individuals have proven to be pro-Obama goons as well as radical racist La Raza groups.
During an August 2009 demonstration in Mehville, Missouri, Obamacare opponents were locked out of a town hall meeting before Union thugs viciously attacked patriot and Tea Party activist Kenneth Gladney, who was handing out Gadsden flags outside the stage-managed event, while hurling racist insults.
During a November 2009 immigration enforcement rally, A.N.S.W.E.R.-hired pro-illegal thugs attacked 62-year-old Dave Caulkett of Floridians for Immigration Enforcement, pummeling him with their signs and kicking him in the face as other A.N.S.W.E.R. goons cheered.
But you won’t see hide nor hair of Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann or Bill Maher attacking racist pro-illegal hate groups who threaten to murder Americans with axes, because it simply doesn’t fit into their or the federal government’s primary mission, which is to smear peaceful Americans angry at how big government and huge corporations are manipulating and siding with millions of illegal aliens to crush the middle class, as violent racist extremists who need to be silenced.
Alex Jones’ Battle For The Republic exposes how the elite are using illegal immigration and pushing amnesty as a means of pulverizing the American middle class and ensuring that U.S. citizens, black, white and hispanic alike, are forced to sacrifice their freedom and sovereignty as America is sunk into a third world cesspool. Watch below.
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Shipping in hard narcotics from abroad while busting casual dope smokers
Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Friday, May 7th, 2010
Video of a SWAT narcotics raid in Columbia, Missouri has gone viral on the
internet after officers stormed into a house, shooting one family pet dog
and killing another in front of a small child, only to discover an insignificantly
small amount of marijuana.
The incident provides a compelling example of how the phony war on drugs
in America operates.
The raid occurred in February, but the footage has only recently come to light
as the case has been ongoing.
The video shows heavily armed officers forcibly entering the home of 25 year old Jonathan E. Whitworth and his wife and 7-year-old son.
Police are said to have received "intelligence from two informants that claimed Whitworth had a large amount of high-grade marijuana at his residence."
The footage reveals that a shot is immediately fired by the officers upon entry to the house. According to a report in the Columbia Daily Tribune, this shot was not thought to have wounded either of the two dogs, one corgi and one pit bull.
A further report in the Tribune somewhat contradicts this explanation, as it outlines the incident as described by the Columbia Police Chief Ken Burton:
Three officers shot at the pit bull, and the first missed completely, which is when the corgi is believed to have been shot in the paw, he said. The pit bull acted aggressively toward a SWAT member again as they pushed into the home, which resulted in the animal being shot, he said. After being shot, it moved to attack a SWAT member, which is when the dog was killed.
The police chief did not indicate any regret for sending an armed SWAT team into a family home and shooting up the dogs, rather he indicated that the warrant to search the home was executed too late to catch Whitworth with more marijuana.
“It was not a mistake to shoot the pit bull,” Burton said. “I wouldn’t be standing here if an officer had been bitten by a pit bull instead of the reverse happening.”
The raw footage follows this analysis of the incident by Alex Jones in which he explains how it is a centerpiece of the government's phony war on drugs. Alex explains how the CIA and other agencies of government have admittedly carried out narcotrafficking operations for decades. This is especially true in Afghanistan, where troops guard opium crops, and the fight against the Taliban and al qaeda is mired in drug trafficking.
Whitworth pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of possession of drug paraphernalia. This was in exchange for dropping charges of misdemeanor marijuana possession and second-degree child endangerment. Casual pot smoking constitutes child endangerment, bursting into homes and firing automatic weapons is apparently a valid solution to this problem.
An internal review is scheduled for completion in two weeks. Whitworth and his family are reportedly considering a civil action against the department.
Reaction to the incident and the video has been heated. The Columbia Police Department has been bombarded with phone calls and e-mails following what it has described as a "widespread misinformation campaign" on internet message boards and blogs. The department also says it has received a direct death threat toward Columbia police officers.
This is not an isolated incident. According to research by the CATO institute, paramilitary police forces are conducting up to 40,000 forced, unannounced raids every year on nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders, and wrongly targeted civilians.
While militarized police are trained to aggressively crush any notion that marijuana use is tolerable, federal government agencies, aided and abetted by giant offshore financial corporations, are shipping in the majority of hard narcotics into the U.S.
These controlling powers are working to keep marijuana illegal as a pretext create artificial scarcity and jack up their profits, as well as to pack privately owned and run prisons with non violent offenders.
This is reality at the centre of the phony Drug War, as documented in Kevin Booth's excellent documentary films American Drug War and How Weed Won The West.
Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
May 7, 2010
The Cato Institute has compiled information on botched SWAT thug raids around the country and produced the map below. The map graphically reveals how often militarized police mistakenly terrorize citizens as the government pursues its totalitarian drug war.
Militarized SWAT Drug Raids on the Rise botched
From Cato:
The proliferation of SWAT teams, police
militarization, and the Drug War have given
rise to a dramatic increase in the number
of “no-knock” or “quick-knock” raids on
suspected drug offenders. Because these
raids are often conducted based on tips
from notoriously unreliable confidential
informants, police sometimes conduct
SWAT-style raids on the wrong home,
or on the homes of nonviolent, mis-
demeanor drug users. Such highly-
volatile, overly confrontational tactics are
bad enough when no one is hurt —
it’s difficult to imagine the terror an
innocent suspect or family faces when
a SWAT team mistakenly breaks down
their door in the middle of the night.
But even more disturbing are the
number of times such “wrong door” raids unnecessarily lead to the injury or death of suspects, bystanders, and police officers. Defenders of SWAT teams and paramilitary tactics say such incidents are isolated and rare.
A map showing raids on correctly identified addresses would be ten-deep with markers.
Alex Jones has produced a video (below) in response to a brutal drug raid in Missouri that resulted in steroid SWAT cops executing one family dog and wounding another during a drug raid that netted less than a gram of marijuana. Alex describes how the government imports drugs (primarily heroin and cocaine) and then brutalizes and imprisons citizens who are foolish enough to consume drugs.
People are outraged by the thuggish and murderous behavior of the cops in Missouri. “In Columbia, police are getting death threats over a February drug raid where SWAT team members shot a suspect’s dogs, killing one of them,” reports the Crime Scene KC blog. “The department’s police chief is defending the officers, saying the pit bull was acting aggressively. The other dog is a corgi and lived. The chief notes they’re reviewing their policies on raids because of the raid.”
Militarized SWAT Drug Raids on the Rise 140410banner4
Jonathan E. Whitworth entered into a plea agreement with the state to drop charges of possession of marijuana and second-degree child endangerment for a guilty plea to possession of drug paraphernalia, according to the Columbia Daily Tribune.
Psychotic cops like shooting dogs during drug raids. In 2008, a Maryland SWAT team raided the home of Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye Calvo and shot two of his dogs to death. “It’s worth emphasizing that these were labs. Not the most intimidating dog in the world. Of course, offing the dog is almost standard procedure in these things, now,” writes Radley Balko. “On the other hand, maybe once a few public officials feel the brunt end of the militarized drug war, we’ll get some real discussion about whether it’s all really necessary.”
Calvo was eventually cleared of any wrongdoing. Police refused to apologize for executing his pets.
Cops not only kill dogs during drug raids. They also murder people. In 2006 cops in Atlanta, Georgia, slaughtered 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston with a hail of gunfire during a botched raid. In order to cover up their crime, the police planted bags of marijuana in Johnston’s house after her death.
The murder was so outrageous and public outrage so intense the state of Georgia was obliged to put three cops on trial.
“The fundamental travesty is the use of such paramilitary-style police tactics in the first place. It has become commonplace in the US drug war for teams of black-clad anti-drug officers to knock down doors without warning, often in the middle of the night, setting off stun grenades, tackling confused residents to the ground and handcuffing them or waving guns in their faces or holding guns to their heads — sometimes even children,” writes David Borden in response to the death of Alberta Spruill during a mistaken drug raid in New York. The 57-year-old Harlem woman died of a heart attack after police threw a stun grenade into her apartment. New York ended up paying $1.6 million to Spruill’s family.
Indeed, as Borden notes, the drug war is a travesty. It has nothing to do with preventing the consumption of illegal drugs, however, as the government and the corporate media tell us. It is about making a tidy profit for the CIA (so they can run their covert ops off the books) and Wall Street. It is also an excuse to militarize the cops and expand the for-profit prison industry.
Militarized cops that have cut their teeth on harmless drug users will be soon be used on the American people as they turn out in the streets in response to the Greatest Depression now unfolding.
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