Police and Terrorism: One and the Same by Bill Buppert
“I said to (Haynes) that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process.”
“At which point, his eyes got wide and he said, ‘Wait a minute, we can’t have acquittals. If we’ve been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? . . . We’ve got to have convictions.'”
– Morris Davis to William J. Haynes II (Former General Counsel for Department of Defense) on Guantanamo trials of detainees during the War on Terror. The current War on Terror inaugurated in 2001 by Bush II ushered in an era when the US government made torture its official policy as I wrote here. It also started a broad fusillade against every basic liberty of every human living within the borders of the American tax jurisdiction. While ostensibly a full scale assault on “terrorists”, it has provided an object lesson in how one becomes what one hunts.
I will state my desire up front: I don’t want the police to be reformed, watched, video-recorded, monitored, disarmed, watch-dogged, controlled, quality checked, investigated, punished, prosecuted or anything else. I simply want them gone. I want their current employment to cease and desist. From the FLEAs (Federal Law Enforcement Agents) all the way to the local constabulary, all must be permanently furloughed and asked to find more productive work like mowing lawns, bagging groceries or playing video-games. It could be somewhat cathartic to have apology tours across the nation by every cop employed or retired through the communities they “served”. We could provide them with a by-name list of anyone they have harassed, fined, kidnapped, caged or maimed to map out their respective apology tours. Those murdered by departments could have their graves identified for the appropriate visit by the acknowledged killer (who most likely served nothing more than a paid administrative “leave”) in the thin “black and blue” line.
I have made a comprehensive case for the reduction and elimination of police forces already and will not make the case here.
All department buildings, vehicles, uniforms and the miscellany of appropriated goods can be sold at auction to include all asset forfeiture and seizure “property”. The proceeds would be disbursed to all the arrested and caged victims of consensual and non-violent crime enforcement.
A free society would not require the tattooing or branding of these former officers to readily identify them as a threat to polite society but a shunning campaign could be instituted for the more egregious bullies in their ranks.
Before the 20th century, cops were few and far between in these united States, yet today most of the populace mewl in fear when one proposes the cops simply go away…forever.
What are they afraid of? The police have no duty to protect individuals from harm in society.
“The Supreme Court of the United States has ruled numerous times since 1856 that law enforcement officers have no duty to protect any individual, despite the motto “protect and serve”.
Their duty is to enforce the law in general. The first such case was in 1856 (South v. Maryland) and the most recent in 2005 (Town of Castle Rock v. Gonzales).[69]” Their charter is clear and always has been: they enforce the laws of our rulers no matter how unjust, silly, murderous or just plain stupid.
They constantly and insipidly insist that they are simply doing their jobs, much like the Nazi defendants at Nuremberg. Their behavior is much more like an occupation force than a community peace officer operation. From the Drug War to the Raw Food raids, they are the enablers of all the bad laws people constantly and incessantly bellyache about yet the government-media complex has done an extraordinary job of hanging bunting and patriotic gore on the image of the armed tax-eater as a hero and pillar of the community; such a worthy protector that his safety will always trump that of a mundane citizen.
If the object of policing is creating a safe and stable community for people to work and play in, then that is certainly not the effect. Cops are historians when it comes to real crimes, especially those perpetrated against individuals, for they respond to crimes in progress or well after the fact and rarely seem to resolve violent situations without leaving a trail of blood and tears behind them.
I would love to find the documented evidence of how many innocents are run down or petty criminals shot by cops annually. As a matter of fact, when the bagpipes are playing at a funeral for a cop, there is a greater than fifty percent chance they died in a traffic accident and the numbers are minuscule per capita (56 died by gunfire in 2010 and no percentage identified of how many were the result of fratricide): nearly one million sworn “officers” and on average approximately 125 die every year in the line of duty. Nearly three times that number perish annually by their own hand. There are 17,000 police departments in these united States and zero reliable data available on the number of people maimed and killed by the police but simply from the news and anecdotal reports, the numbers are certainly higher than cop fatalities.
I am going to make a banal but obvious correlation between police forces and terrorism. They are one and the same. I have a natural Rothbardian revulsion toward any initiated violence and find that in the lion’s share of police confrontations in America, the police inevitably draw first blood and participate, under color of law and authority, in the most sadistic andvicious behavior humans can outside of the CIA “Black Sites” although the behavior inside police stations may rival that. Caleb Carr has stated in his brilliant tome, The Lessons of Terror, that terrorism is simply “politically motivated violence against non-combatants and innocents”.
What political component? By their own admission, police officers are law enforcers and the political process is how laws are divined; so, cops are by their very nature the Praetorian Guard for the ruling class at all levels. How many times has one heard the tired old saw by police that they are simply “upholding the law”? One can dither about the employment of the term unlawful but in America that has as much definitional weight as unconstitutional. If you suppose this is making too fine a point then why would America turn its back so abruptly on the Hague and Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture to quite literally bureaucratize and institutionalize torture and cruelty in the global military campaign to eradicate a tactic e.g., terrorism? Can one adduce that the American police culture increasingly mimics the military in dress and behavior? Can you think of a more natural seedbed for cruelty and torture than the video evidence that piles up day after day of police abuse of the citizenry? These are not isolated incidents. The modern police demand instant obedience or they will beat, electrocute or shoot you for the mere act of resistance or defiance. Let that sink in: the government sanctions the initiated savaging of innocent civilians (presumption of innocence) who don’t grovel and scrape and obsequiously comply with the orders of the armed agents of big government. America, indeed.
Let’s use the government’s own definitions to make the case for a healthy petard hoisting. One finds that the straightforward and simple US National Counterterrorism Center definition dovetails nicely with Carr.
US National Counterterrorism Center
The US National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) described a terrorist act as: “…premeditated; perpetrated by a sub national or clandestine agent; politically motivated, potentially including religious, philosophical, or culturally symbolic motivations; violent; and perpetrated against a noncombatant target.” [57]
Other agencies propose the following variations:
United States Code (U.S.C.)
Title 22, Chapter 38 of the United States Code (regarding the Department of State) contains a definition of terrorism in its requirement that annual country reports on terrorism be submitted by the Secretary of State to Congress every year. It reads:
“Definitions … the term ‘terrorism’ means premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by sub national groups or clandestine agents;”[53]
US Code of Federal Regulations
The US Code of Federal Regulations defines terrorism as “…the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives” (28 C.F.R. Section 0.85).
US national security strategy
In September 2002 the US national security strategy defined terrorism as “premeditated, politically motivated violence against innocents”.[55] This definition did not exclude actions by the United States government and it was qualified some months later with “premeditated, politically motivated violence against noncombatant targets by sub national groups or clandestine agents”.[56]
United States Department of Defense
TheUnited States Department of Defense recently changed its definition of terrorism. Per Joint Pub 3-07.2, Antiterrorism, (24 November 2010) the Department of Defense defines it as “the unlawful use of violence or threat of violence to instill fear and coerce governments or societies. Terrorism is often motivated by religious, political, or other ideological beliefs and committed in the pursuit of goals that are usually political.”
The new definition distinguishes between motivations for terrorism (religion, ideology, etc.) and goals of terrorism (“usually political”). This is in contrast to the previous definition which stated that the goals could be religious in nature. The sly use of the term lawful and unlawful allows the DoD to give soldiers a “get out of jail free” card for what appears to be terroristic behavior; a standard that has been suborned into the corpus of the American constabulary.
USA PATRIOT Act
The USA PATRIOT Act defines terrorism activities as “activities that (A) involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the U.S. or of any state, that (B) appear to be intended (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion, or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping, and (C) occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the U.S.”
Quite simply, no War on Terror is complete without a total dismantling and salting of the earth of all government sponsored police organizations and their concomitant support apparatus. One could make a robust case that our various “police actions” around the world and especially in the Middle East prompted the attack on America in the first place. One can make an even more convincing case that none of our freedoms would be extinct or disappearing absent the presence of police.
The War on Terror truly begins at home. The terror mindset emulates the TSA’s mantra of “Dominate. Intimidate. Control” which saturates police training across the fruited plain and is the sine qua non of cop behavior in the most benign encounters. This nicely complements the illogical and cowardly“officer safety” mantra that literally gives them a license to initiate violence and get away with it. Until Americans finally realize that police are not their friends but their masters, no freedom is possible. They are not there to protect the citizenry; they are the armed bulwark for big and small government, the tip of the spear thrust into every notion of decency, liberty and freedom. Most likely, few of the crimes policed are malum in se such as crimes against property or person and most are crimes the government created out of whole cloth such as drug use, DUI, prostitution and the myriad federal regulations that ensnare unwitting citizens. Essentially, crimes with no victims except the unfortunates fined and caged by the police.
We have all seen and read the horrific accounts of the police savagingand mauling of women and children. This is not only what they are capable of, this is what they do. Every day.
The police are just as legitimate as the rulers and masters who walk their leashes. The odd political tensions between alleged Left and Right differences mean that, quite literally, you agree to the rightness and moral superiority of every law. Good luck with that.
The next time you watch one of the legions of police brutality videos on the internet, ask yourself: who really hates you for your freedoms (what few are left)?
– On June 8, 1978, Solzhenitzyn, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for Literature in 1970 for his book “The Gulag Archipelago,” was addressing an audience at Harvard University: ”
And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? . . .”
Malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium
