Battlefield America: The War on the American
People
By John W. Whitehead
April 21, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" -
“A government which will turn its tanks upon its people, for any reason, is a
government with a taste of blood and a thirst for power and must either be
smartly rebuked, or blindly obeyed in deadly fear.”—John Salter
We have entered into a particularly dismal chapter in the American narrative,
one that shifts us from a swashbuckling tale of adventure into a bone-chilling
horror story.
As I document in my new book
Battlefield America: The War on the American People, “we the people” have
now come full circle, from being held captive by the British police state to
being held captive by the American police state. In between, we have charted a
course from revolutionaries fighting for our independence and a free people
establishing a new nation to pioneers and explorers, braving the wilderness and
expanding into new territories.
Where we went wrong, however, was in allowing ourselves to become enthralled
with and then held hostage by a military empire in bondage to a corporate state
(the very definition of fascism). No longer would America hold the moral high
ground as a champion of freedom and human rights. Instead, in the pursuit of
profit, our overlords succumbed to greed, took pleasure in inflicting pain,
exported torture, and imported the machinery of war, transforming the American
landscape into a battlefield, complete with military personnel, tactics and
weaponry.
To our dismay, we now find ourselves scrambling for a foothold as our once
rock-solid constitutional foundation crumbles beneath us. And no longer can we
rely on the president, Congress, the courts, or the police to protect us from
wrongdoing.
Indeed, they have come to embody all that is wrong with America.
For instance, how does a man who is relatively healthy when taken into custody
by police
lapse
into a coma and die while under their supervision? What kind of twisted
logic allows a police officer to
use
a police car to run down an American citizen and justifies it in the name of
permissible deadly force? And what country are we living in where the police can
beat, shoot, choke, taser and tackle American citizens, all with the protection
of the courts?
Certainly, the Constitution’s safeguards against police
abuse means nothing when government agents can crash through your door,
terrorize your children,
shoot your dogs, and jail you on any number of trumped of charges, and you
have little say in the matter. For instance, San Diego police, responding to a
domestic disturbance call on a Sunday morning, showed up at the wrong address,
only to
shoot the homeowner’s 6-year-old service dog in the head.
Rubbing salt in the wound, it’s often the unlucky victim of excessive police
force who ends up being charged with wrongdoing. Although 16-year-old Thai
Gurule was charged with resisting arrest and strangling and assaulting police
officers, a circuit judge found that it was actually the three officers who
unlawfully
stopped, tackled, punched, kneed, tasered and yanked his hair who were at
fault. Thankfully, bystander cell phone videos undermined police accounts, which
were described as “works of fiction.”
Not even our children are being
spared the blowback from a growing police presence. As one juvenile court
judge noted in testimony to Congress, although having police on public school
campuses did not make the schools any safer, it did result in large numbers of
students being
arrested for misdemeanors such as school fights and disorderly conduct. One
11-year-old autistic Virginia student was charged with disorderly conduct and
felony assault after
kicking a trashcan and resisting a police officer’s attempt to handcuff him.
A 14-year-old
student was tasered by police, suspended and charged with disorderly
conduct, resisting arrest and trespassing after he failed to obey a teacher’s
order to be the last student to exit the classroom.
There is no end to the government’s unmitigated gall in riding roughshod over
the rights of the citizenry, whether in matters of excessive police powers,
militarized police, domestic training drills, SWAT team raids, surveillance,
property rights, overcriminalization, roadside strip searches, profit-driven
fines and prison sentences, etc.
The president can now direct the military to detain, arrest and
secretly execute American citizens. These are the powers of an imperial
dictator, not an elected official bound by the rule of law. For the time being,
Barack Obama wears the executioner’s robe, but you can rest assured that this
mantle will be worn by whomever occupies the Oval Office in the future.
A representative government means nothing when the average citizen has little to
no access to their elected officials, while corporate lobbyists enjoy a
revolving door relationship with everyone from the President on down. Indeed,
while members of Congress
hardly work for the taxpayer, they work hard at being wooed by corporations,
which
spend more to lobby our elected representatives than we spend on their
collective salaries. For that matter, getting elected is no longer the high
point it used to be. As one congressman noted, for many elected officials,
“Congress is no longer a destination but a journey… [to a]
more lucrative job as a K Street lobbyist… It's become routine to see
members of Congress drop their seat in Congress like a hot rock when a
particularly lush vacancy opens up.”
As for the courts, they have long since ceased being courts of justice. Instead,
they have become courts of order, largely marching in lockstep with the
government’s dictates, all the while helping to increase the largesse of
government coffers. It’s called for-profit justice, and it runs the gamut of all
manner of financial incentives in which the courts become cash cows for
communities looking to make an extra buck. As journalist Chris Albin-Lackey
details, “They deploy a crushing array of fines, court costs, and other fees
to harvest revenues from minor offenders that these communities cannot or do not
want to raise through taxation.” In this way, says Albin-Lackey, “A resident of
Montgomery, Alabama who commits a simple noise violation faces only a $20
fine—but also a
whopping $257 in court costs and user fees should they seek to have their
day in court.”
As for the rest—the schools, the churches, private businesses, service
providers, nonprofits and your fellow citizens—many are also marching in
lockstep with the police state. This is what is commonly referred to as
community policing. After all, the police can’t be everywhere. So how do you
police a nation when your population outnumbers your army of soldiers? How do
you carry out surveillance on a nation when there aren’t enough cameras, let
alone viewers, to monitor every square inch of the country 24/7? How do you not
only track but analyze the transactions, interactions and movements of every
person within the United States? The answer is simpler than it seems: You
persuade the citizenry to be your eyes and ears.
It’s a brilliant ploy, with the added bonus that while the citizenry remains
focused on and distrustful of each other, they’re incapable of focusing on more
definable threats that fall closer to home—namely, the government and its
militarized police. In this way, we’re seeing a rise in the incidence of
Americans being reported for growing vegetables in their front yard, keeping
chickens in their back yard, letting their kids walk to the playground alone,
and voicing anti-government sentiments. For example, after Shona Banda’s son
defended the use of medical marijuana during a presentation at school,
school officials alerted the police and social services, and the 11-year-old was
interrogated, taken into custody by social workers, had his home raided by
police and his mother arrested.
Now it may be that we have nothing to worry about. Perhaps the government really
does have our best interests at heart. Perhaps covert domestic military training
drills such as
Jade Helm really are just benign exercises to make sure our military is
prepared for any contingency. As the Washington Post
describes the operation:
The mission is vast both geographically and strategically: Elite service
members from all four branches of the U.S. military will launch an operation
this summer in which they will operate covertly among the U.S. public and
travel from state to state in military aircraft. Texas, Utah and a section
of southern California are labeled as hostile territory, and New Mexico
isn’t much friendlier.
Now I don’t believe in worrying over nothing, but it’s safe to say that the
government has not exactly shown itself to be friendly in recent years, nor have
its agents shown themselves to be cognizant of the fact that they are civilians
who answer to the citizenry, rather than the other way around.
Whether or not the government plans to impose some form of martial law in the
future remains to be seen, but there can be no denying that we’re being
accustomed to life in a military state. The malls may be open for business, the
baseball stadiums may be packed, and the news anchors may be twittering nonsense
about the latest celebrity foofa, but those are just distractions from what is
really taking place: the transformation of America into a war zone.
Trust me, if it looks like a battlefield (armored tanks on the streets,
militarized police in metro stations, surveillance cameras everywhere), sounds
like a battlefield (SWAT team raids nightly, sound cannons to break up large
assemblies of citizens), and acts like a battlefield (police shooting first and
asking questions later, intimidation tactics, and involuntary detentions), it’s
a battlefield.
Indeed, what happened in Ocala, Florida, is a good metaphor for what’s happening
across the country: Sheriff’s deputies, dressed in special ops uniforms and
riding in an armored tank on a public road, pulled a 23-year-old man over and
issued a warning violation to him after
he gave them the finger. The man, Lucas Jewell, defended his actions as a
free speech expression of his distaste for militarized police.
Translation: “We the people” are being hijacked on the highway by government
agents with little knowledge of or regard for the Constitution, who are hyped up
on the power of their badge, outfitted for war, eager for combat, and taking a
joy ride—on taxpayer time and money—in a military tank that has no business
being on American soil.
Rest assured, unless we slam on the brakes, this runaway tank will soon be
charting a new course through terrain that bears no resemblance to land of our
forefathers, where freedom meant more than just the freedom to exist and consume
what the corporate powers dish out.
Rod Serling, one of my longtime heroes and the creator of The Twilight Zone,
understood all too well the danger of turning a blind eye to evil in our midst,
the “things that scream for a response.” As Serling warned, “if we don't listen
to that scream - and if we don't respond to it - we may well wind up sitting
amidst our own rubble, looking for the truck that hit us - or the bomb that
pulverized us. Get the license number of whatever it was that destroyed the
dream. And I think we will find that the vehicle was registered in our own
name.”
If you haven’t managed to read the writing on the wall yet, the war has begun.
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president
of The Rutherford Institute.
|
Click for
Spanish,
German,
Dutch,
Danish,
French,
translation- Note-
Translation may take a
moment to load.
What's your response?
-
Scroll down to add / read comments
Please
read our
Comment Policy
before posting -
It is unacceptable to slander, smear or engage in personal attacks on authors of articles posted on ICH.
Those engaging in that behavior will be banned from the comment section.
|
| |
|
