Saturday, March 9, 2013

Are they occupying us?

The military has been arming and training our local police forces:


This is just the beginning, people. Just the beginning.

Many have lamented the fact that the police have become increasingly militarized. But an equally dangerous trend has been occurring, the tendency for the military to act like police. True warriors abide by the code of war; they may wound or kill their foe on the battlefield, but they still can have respect for him as a fellow warrior. Police also have a code, but I doubt they respect their foes. Who can have respect for a criminal, except perhaps another criminal? And when soldiers start treating their enemies as if they were mere criminals, when they start having the same mindset as the police, the abuses of the street become the abuses of the battlefield; the cruelty of our prisons becomes the cruelty of our stockades.

When the leadership (e.g., Donald Rumsfeld and John Brennan) tells his soldier-cops to take off the gloves, you wind up with Abu Ghraib, torture militia on the Pentagon's payroll, and drones that kill more children than terrorists.

The chickens are coming home to roost, America. You didn't give a shit when you tortured the Vietnamese, you didn't give a shit when you tortured the El Salvadorans, you didn't give a shit when you tortured the Iraqis, did you? And NOW you're going to give a shit when "your" soldier-cops torture and kill American citizens on US soil?

What a sick joke this is all becoming.

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