There are 8 Major Threats numerous inherent dangers in our world that can change life as we know it and even threaten our very existence, but many people choose to ignore the warning signs or simply don’t believe anything could happen to them.
Those among us who are more cautious and savvy would rather not take the risk of being unprepared for any eventuality that could put the future of a global power like America into question.
World Economic Forum lists the dangers
A good starting point when trying to assess the potential dangers that the world faces is to take a look at what the World Economic Forum considers to be the biggest dangers that threaten our stability.
The world is smaller than before and global events are increasingly likely to have a major impact on any country, regardless of where the event occurs. So even if it does not actually happen on American soil, it is likely that the impact of such an event will effect change in our lives and create a sense of panic for those that are unprepared for a geopolitical, environmental or any other crisis that might strike.
The World Economic Forum – made up of about 900 experts from around the world – have highlighted no fewer than 28 risks they believe could threaten our stability.
Geopolitical tensions
Number one of 8 Major Threats on their list, and the biggest perceived threat to world stability, is state conflict.
The crisis that is developing in Ukraine and the distinctly uneasy relationship between Russia and its European neighbors and the rest of the world, as well a stand-off between China and Japan, all suggest that there is currently a strategic power battle going on which could spill over into conflict at some point.
This is the first time in the history of the Economic Forum list of threats that geopolitical threats have made their number one spot and, just 25 years after the historic fall of the Berlin Wall, it seems that there is a very real risk of major conflict – a conflict which could drag all major powers into a scenario which could even involve nuclear power.
In search of water
Environmental concerns are rated as the second biggest threat to world stability. A lack of resources has led some commentators to suggest that water is the new oil, meaning that countries that have it will come under threat from an invasion of people who don’t have access to it.
As an estimated five billion people on the planet already have problematic access to clean water, we could easily witness the same tensions around water that we have seen surrounding the control of oil in the past.
Basically, we already need about 70% of the world’s water supply to support the agriculture that feeds the world. When you consider that the World Bank estimates that we need to increase food production by 50% by 2030 to meet the needs of the world population, it is understandable that there could be war over the control of freshwater supplies.
Be prepared
In the event of an emergency situation where your access to normal water supplies is cut off, you will need to be prepared by having a stockpile of bottled water as well as having a long term plan that goes beyond your immediate resources.
There are numerous guides on how to create an emergency water supply and how much water you might need. You might also consider reading a guide on how to create a well for your own personal water supply.
Toxins in water is another consideration. There are toxins in our water supply that present a serious health risk for humans after prolonged exposure. A simple way of combatting this threat of contaminated water is prepare your own super-water which is free of toxins, using an ingredient like Bragg Apple Cider Vinegar which will help to purify the water supply until you again have access to fresh water.
Large-scale terrorism
The terrible events that were witnessed with 9/11 set a new and unwelcome benchmark in terms of large-scale terrorism, but there are fears that further atrocities – even the use of weapons of mass destruction – could take place in the U.S and other parts of the world in the future.
The rise of Islamic State (Isil) highlights in particular how terrorism knows no boundaries. When you consider that Isil managed to grab land and mobilize some 30,000 fighters for their cause in a short space of time, large-scale terrorism is a very real threat that we should be prepared for.
Be prepared
You may be forced to defend your property and your family from a localized attack and the best way to do this is to ensure that you have a suitable cache of weapons to be able to provide the protection you need.
The Prepper Journal lists the top five firearms that you need to get your hands on, including, perhaps not surprisingly, a handgun and a shotgun.
Handguns and shotguns are relatively easy to use and if you are forced into a home defense situation that requires engaging with someone who is threatening your personal security, you can find a model that is quite forgiving if you are not an experienced shot, but still very effective. You may also consider an Aimpoint red dot sight to improve your aim.
A shotgun is also very useful if you need to hunt down small game and even larger animals if you need to go in search of food.
Trigger-happy Putin
The potential of large-scale terrorism by extremist groups like Islamic State to threaten our stability should never be underestimated but a danger that America in particular is facing is more likely to come from Russia and Vladimir Putin.
When you consider America’s history of predicting future threats, it doesn’t really inspire a great deal of confidence that Washington will judge Putin’s moves correctly or timeously.
Past events like Pearl Harbor, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the collapse of South Vietnam in the 1970’s are all major events that America’s policy elite at the time failed to predict and act accordingly.
Imposing damaging economic sanctions on the Russian president would currently appear to hurt the powerhouse based in the Kremlin. Russia has the firepower and resources to threaten America’s survival and the danger that they pose is much larger than the challenges we are currently facing in dealing with threats from ISIS.
President Putin is widely considered to believe that the revolution in Ukraine was a U.S-backed coup aimed at weakening Russia and his government has consistently and repeatedly warned against Western economic and political intervention.
In fact, America and Russia have control of over 90% of the world’s nuclear arsenal but, on the other hand, the Russians are currently struggling to keep up the U.S when it comes to investing in new warfighting technology.
The relevance of this imbalance is that Putin would consider a preemptive nuclear strike to be the best strategy to ensure they gain the upper hand. A senior Russian officer recently stated that 96% of their strategic rocket force could be launched within a matter of minutes, so pushing Putin into a corner could have serious consequences for the United States and its citizens.
Some military commentators believe that the U.S is vulnerable to a nuclear strike from Russia and it is only a matter of time before this happens.
Chemical warfare
In terms of weapons of mass destruction, chemical weapons are often perceived to be less of a danger than the one posed by nuclear and biological threats.
This is in stark contrast to the historical record of the use of chemical weapons, which are in fact the most widely used and extensively proliferated weapons of mass destruction. The effect of chemical weapons for the victim of an attack varies from experiencing severe discomfort, physical harm to death, all of which can be achieved with a relatively small amount of chemical weapons.
Many countries have stockpiled and amassed thousands of tons of chemical weapons that date back to the Cold War. The reason for this reliance on chemical weapons is that producing biological or nuclear weapons is more technologically demanding and therefore not within the capabilities of some of the potential aggressors.
There are 188 countries which have joined the Chemical Weapons Convention which means they have agreed not to develop, produce, stockpile or use chemical weapons. However, crucially, there are a number of key countries, mainly in the Middle East, which have not signed up to this treaty.
This means that one of the most volatile regions in the world could witness a rogue nation or terrorists acquiring access to these chemical weapons, which would create a very real threat to the rest of us.
Be prepared
The government has issued a guide to dealing with chemical threats and you need to be aware that these poisonous vapors, liquids or solids have a number of different effects on us, depending on which chemical is involved.
Some chemical agents can be totally odorless or tasteless and they can either affect you immediately or you might suffer a delayed effect which could take anything up to 48 hours to deliver their potentially lethal consequences.
If you have advance warning that an attack is imminent, ensure you have a supply of duct tape and plastic for doors, windows and vents as well as some scissors, so that you can create an emergency sealed shelter with some pre-measured plastic sheeting for each opening.
You should look to choose an internal room for your shelter, preferably one that is on the highest level of the house and without windows.
Cyber attacks
Congress was recently informed by U.S intelligence agencies that cyber attacks pose a greater threat to our national security than terrorism.
The report stated that intelligence had been gathered which showed that Russia, China and North Korea were the leading threats in this regard and that Russia had even set up a cyber command to carry out these attacks.
Whilst a cyber attack might not be targeted directly at you, there is a strong chance that a cyber attack on the global financial system would have far-reaching implications for many of us and could easily create a sense of widespread panic that could lead to civil unrest and a sharp rise in property crime and attacks.
Be prepared
Having a survivalists emergency supply kit will help to get through a food and resources crisis brought about by the collapse of our cyber network.
Natural disasters
Whether you consider yourself to be a prepper or a survivalist might actually be defined by your view on how to cope with a natural disaster. Many preppers like to network with other like-minded people in order to share tips and learn skills that will be useful if and when a natural disaster strikes in your area.
Learning about canning and how to build a fallout shelter are things that will help you to survive a natural disaster and cope in an emergency situation such as as an earthquake or tornado.
Be prepared
In the event of an earthquake, your primary course of action should be to crawl under a sturdy table and cover your head with your arms. If you subsequently become trapped under some debris, cover your mouth with a cloth or shirt and try to attract attention when you hear someone close by tapping against an object like a pipe. Don’t be tempted to shout out, as this will put you at risk for inhaling dangerous levels of dust which could then get into your lungs and cause breathing problems.
If there is a tornado in your area try to get shelter inside and head for the basement, if you have one. If you are outside when the tornado strikes, lie down flat in a ditch in the ground and cover your head with your hands.
If you hear a flash-flood warning, move to higher ground as soon as possible and keep away from downed power lines as they present a serious danger of electrocution.
Zombie invasion
Zombie apocalypse scenarios are very popular at the moment and the fact that there are countless movies that feature this situation only contributes to the conversation on doomsday scenarios of this nature.
Some preppers who make reference to zombies in forums use the term as a metaphor that covers any number of disaster situations and not actually a zombie invasion.
Having said that, there are a number of plausible scientific explanations that make the prospect of a zombie-like situation realistic.
Apparently half of the human population is infected with toxoplasmosis, a parasite which has the ability to turn its victims into mindless zombie-like slaves, or neurotoxins, which slow your body functions down to the point where you are almost dead.
Whether you believe in the plausibility of this particular doomsday scenario or are genuinely concerned about more tangible threats to the future of America or the world as we know it, such as nuclear war and extreme natural disasters, are you prepared?
Charlie Hebdo As the dust settles from this week’s terror extravaganza in France, more loose ends are turning up (or being tied up), with this latest bizarre bombshell which is already fueling speculation as to the covert nature of theCharlie Hebdo false flag affair.
A police commissioner from Limoges, France, HelricFredou,aged 45 (photo, below), turned up dead from a gun shot to the head on Thursday amid the Charlie Hebdo affair. A high-ranking official within the French law enforcement command-and-control structure, Fredou was also a former deputy directorof the regionalpoliceservice.
According France 3, his body was “found by a colleague” at approximately 1am Thursday – only hours after the initial Paris attack.
At the time of his death, police claim to have not known the reason for his alleged suicide. This was reflected in their official statements to the media: “It is unknownat this timethe reasons forhis actions”. However, a back story appears to have been inserted simultaneously, most likely from the very same police media liaisons, who then told the press that Fredou was ‘depressed and overworked’. For any law enforcement officer in France, it would seem rather odd that anyone would want to miss the biggest single terror event in the century, or history in the making, as it were.
Here is a link to the original report in the French media, which confirms that Commissioner Fredou was indeed working on the Charlie Hebdo case:
“TheFredouCommissioner, like all agentsSRPJ,workedyesterdayon the caseof the massacreat the headquarters ofCharlieHebdo.In particular, hewas investigatingthe family ofone of the victims. He killed himselfbeforecompleting its report. A psychological ‘cell’was set upin thepolice station.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: It is not yet known to 21WIRE exactly how the fatal gun shot occurred, but if any other past political and high-profile ‘suicided’ cases are anything to go by, authorities will claim that this victim either shot himself in the back of the head, with his non-shooting hand. In addition, if that were the case, there would also be a lack of gun powder burns on the hands according to the autopsy.
UK-based investigative reporter Morris108, interviews ‘Phil in France’ regarding this new development:
Even more bizarrely, an almost identical event took place just over one year earlier, November 2013 in Limoges, when the number 3 ranked SRPJ officer had killed himself in similar circumstances, with his weapon in the police hotel. Allegedly, his colleague discovered his body. The prosecution ruled that case was a suicide too, and the police officer had left a suicide note to his family in which he expressed “personal reasons” for his surprising action. Stay tuned for more updates on this story at 21WIRE.
Sputnik News
Police commissioner, who had been investigating the attack on the Charlie Hebdo magazine committed suicide with his service gun on Thursday night.
Police commissioner Helric Fredou, who had been investigating the attack on the French weekly satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, committed suicide in his office. The incident occurred in Limoges, the administrative capital of the Limousin region in west-central France, on Thursday night, local media France 3 reports.
Helric Fredou, 45, suffered from ‘depression’ and experienced ‘burn out’ [according to the official statement]. Shortly before committing suicide, he met with the family of a victim of the Charlie Hebdo attack and killed himself preparing the report.
Fredou began his career in 1997 as a police officer at the regional office of the judicial police of Versailles. Later he returned to Limoges, his hometown. Since 2012 he had been the deputy director of the regional police service.
“We are all shocked. Nobody was ready for such developments”, a representative of the local police union told reporters.
On January 7, 2015, two gunmen burst into the editorial office of Charlie Hebdo magazine, known for issuing cartoons, ridiculing Islam. The [suspected] attackers, later identified as brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi, killed 12 people and injured 11, and escaped from the scene. Following two days of nationwide manhunt, the suspects were killed on Friday by French police some 20 miles northeast of Paris.
When communities attempt to police the police, they often get, well… policed.
In several states, organized groups that use police scanners and knowledge of checkpoints to collectively monitor police activities by legally and peacefully filming cops on duty have said they’ve experienced retaliation, including unjustified detainment and arrests as well as police intimidation.
The groups operate under many decentralized organizations, most notably CopWatch and Cop Block, and have proliferated across the United States in the last decade – and especially in the aftermath of the events that continue to unfold in Ferguson, Missouri, after officer Darren Wilson fatally shot unarmed, black teenager Michael Brown.
Many such groups have begun proactively patrolling their communities with cameras at various times during the week, rather than reactively turning on their cameras when police enter into their neighborhoods or when they happen to be around police activity.
Across the nation, local police departments are responding to organized cop watching patrols by targeting perceived leaders, making arrests, threatening arrests, yanking cameras out of hands and even labeling particular groups “domestic extremist” organizations and part of the sovereign citizens movement – the activities of which the FBI classifies as domestic terrorism.
Courts across the nation at all levels have upheld the right to film police activity. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and photographer’s associcationshave taken many similar incidents to court, consistently winning cases over the years. The Supreme Court has ruled police can’t search an individual’s cellphone data without a warrant. Police also can’t legally delete an individual’s photos or video images under any circumstances.
“Yet, a continuing stream of these incidents (often driven by police who have been fed ‘nonsense‘ about links between photography and terrorism) makes it clear that the problem is not going away,” writes Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy & Technology Project.
Sources who have participated in various organized cop watching groups in cities such as New York; Chicago; Cleveland; Las Vegas; Oakland; Arlington, Texas; Austin and lastly Ferguson, Missouri, told Truthout they have experienced a range of police intimidation tactics, some of which have been caught on film. Cop watchers told Truthout they have been arrested in several states, including Texas, New York, Ohio and California in retaliation for their filming activity.
More recently, in September, three cop watchers were arrested while monitoring police activity during a traffic stop in Arlington, Texas. A group of about 20 people, a few of them associated with the Tarrant County Peaceful Streets Project, gathered at the intersection of South Cooper Street and Lynda Lane during a Saturday night on September 6 to film police as they conducted a traffic stop. A video of what happened next was posted at YouTube.
Arlington police charged Janie Lucero, her husband, Kory Watkins, and Joseph Tye with interference of public duties. Lucero and Watkins were charged with obstructing a highway while Tye was arrested on charges of refusing to identify himself.
Arlington police have defended the arrests of the three cop watchers, but the watchers say they weren’t interfering with police work, and were told to move 150 feet away from the officers – around the corner of a building where they couldn’t film the officers.
“When we first started [cop watching, the police] seemed kind of bothered a little bit,” Watkins told Truthout. “There was a change somewhere where [the police] started becoming a little bit more offended, and we started having more cop watchers so I guess they felt like they needed to start bringing more officers to traffic stops.”
On the night of Watkin’s arrest, his group had previously monitored two other traffic stops without any confrontation with Arlington police officers before the incident that led to the arrests.
Sometimes, though, retaliation against cop watching groups goes far beyond arresting cop watchers on patrol.
Cops Label Cop Watch Groups Domestic Terrorists
On New Year’s Day in 2012, Antonio Buehler, a West Point graduate and former military officer, witnessed two Austin police officers assaulting a woman. He pulled out his phone.
As he began photographing the officers and asking questions about their activities, the cops assaulted and arrested him. He was charged with spitting in a cop’s face – a felony crime.
However, two witness videos of the incident surfaced and neither of them showed that Buehler spit in Officer Patrick Oborski’s face. A grand jury was finally convened in March 2013 and concluded there was not enough evidence to indict Buehler on any of the crimes he was charged with.
A few months after the New Year’s Day incident, Buehler and other Austin-based activists started the Peaceful Streets Project (PSP), an all-volunteer organization dedicated to stopping police abuse. The group has held “Know Your Rights” trainings and a Police Accountability Summit. The group also regularly organizes cop watch patrols in Austin.
Since the PSP was launched, the movement has grown, with local chapters popping up in other cities and states across the United States, including Texas’ Tarrant County chapter, which the three cop watchers arrested in Arlington were affiliated with.
But as the Peaceful Streets movement spread, police retaliation against the groups, and particularly Buehler himself, also escalated.
“[The Austin Police Department (APD)] sees us as a threat primarily because we shine a spotlight on their crimes,” Buehler said.
The group recently obtained documents from the APD through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request that reveal Austin police colluded to arrest Buehler and other cop watchers affiliated with the Peaceful Streets Project. Since the New Year’s Day incident, Buehler has been arrested three more times by APD officers. At least four other members of PSP have been arrested on charges of interference or failing to identify themselves during their cop watching activities.
The emails indicate APD officers monitored Buehler’s social media posts and attempted to justify arresting him for another felony crime of online impersonation over an obviously satirical post he made on Facebook, as well as reveal that some APD officers coordinated efforts to stop PSP members’ legal and peaceful activities, even suggesting reaching out to the District Attorney’s office to see if anything could be done to incarcerate members of the group.
Another internal email from APD senior officer Justin Berry identifies PSP as a “domestic extremist” organization. Berry writes that he believes police accountability groups including PSP, CopWatch and Cop Block are part of a “national domestic extremism trend.” He believes he found “mirror warning signs” in “FBI intel.” Berry makes a strange attempt to lump police accountability activists and the hacker-collective Anonymous in with sovereign citizens groups as a collective revolutionary movement.
“Sovereign citizens” groups generally believe federal, state and local governments are illegitimate and operate illegally. Some self-described sovereign citizens create fake license plates, identification and forms of currency to circumvent official government institutions. The FBI classifies the activities of sovereign citizens groups as domestic terrorism, considering the groups a growing “domestic threat” to law enforcement.
Buehler told Truthout the APD is working with a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) fusion center to attempt to identify PSP as a sovereign citizens group to associate its members with domestic terrorism with state and federal authorities. DHS fusion centers are designed to gather, analyze and promote the sharing of intelligence information between federal and state agencies.
“They have spent a fair amount of resources tracking us, spying on us and infiltrating our group, and we are just peaceful activists who are demanding accountability for the police,” Buehler told Truthout. “They have absolutely no evidence that we’ve engaged in any criminal activity or that we’ve tried to engage in criminal activity.”
APD officials did not respond to a request for comment.
“They’ve pushed us; they’ve assaulted us for filming them; they’ve used their horses against us and tried to run us into walls; they’ve driven their cars up on us; they illegally detained us and searched us; they get in our face and they yell at us; they threaten to use violent force against us,” Buehler said. “But we didn’t realize until these emails just how deep this intimidation, how deep these efforts were to harm us for trying to hold them accountable.”
Buehler also said the group has additional internal emails which have not been released yet that reveal the APD attempted to take another charge to the District Attorney against him for felony child endangerment over the activities of a teenaged member of PSP.
He said he and other members of PSP were interested in pursuing a joint civil action against the APD over their attempts to frame and arrest them for their First Amendment activities.
This is not the first time a municipal police department has labeled a local cop watching group as an extremist organization.
In 2002, internal files from the Denver Police Department’s (DPD) Intelligence Unit were leaked to the ACLU, revealing the unit had been spying on several activist groups in the city, and keeping extensive records about members of the activist groups. Many of these groups were branded as “criminal extremist” organizations in what later became a full-scale controversy widely known as the Denver police’s “spy files.” Some of the groups falsely branded as “criminal extremist” groups included three police accountability organizations: Denver CopWatch, End the Politics of Cruelty and Justice for Mena.
Again, from October 2003 through the Republican National Convention (RNC) in August 2004, intelligence digests produced by the New York City Police Department (NYPD) on dozens of activist groups, including several police accountability organizations, were made public under a federal court order. TheNYPD labeled participants of the “Operation CopWatch” effort as criminal extremists.
Those who participated in “Operation CopWatch” during the RNC hoped to identify undercover cops who might attempt to provoke violence during demonstrations and document police violence or misconduct against protesters.
Communities Benefiting From Cop Watch Patrols Resist Police Retaliation Against Watchers
In some major urban areas, rates of police harassment of individuals drop considerably after cop watchers take to the streets – and communities band together to defend cop watch patrols that experience police retaliation, say veteran cop watchers.
Veteran police accountability activist José Martín has trained and organized with several organizations that participate in cop watch activities. Martín has been detained and arrested several times while cop watching with organized patrols in New York and Chicago.
His arrests in New York are part of a widely documented problem in the city. In fact, retaliation in New York against cop watchers has been so widespread that the NYPD had to send out an official memo to remind officers that it is perfectly legal for civilians to film cops on duty.
Martín described an experience in Chicago in which he felt police unjustly retaliated against him after a local CopWatch group formed and began regularly patrolling Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood. After the group became well-known by the Pilsen community, residents gathered around an officer who had detained Martín after a patrol one night in 2009, calling for his release. The officer let him go shortly after.
“When cop watchers are retaliated against, if the community is organized, if there is a strong relationship between cop watch patrols and the community, but most importantly, if the cop watchers are people of the community, that community has the power to push back against retaliation and prevent its escalation,” Martín said. “Retaliation doesn’t work if you stand together.”
Another veteran cop watcher, Jacob Crawford, co-founder of Oakland’s We Copwatch, is helping the community of Ferguson, Missouri, organize cop watch patrols and prepare the community for the potential of police retaliation. His group raised $6,000 to pass out 110 cameras to organizers and residents in Ferguson, and train them to monitor police activity in the aftermath of the upheavals that rocked the city after Wilson killed Brown.
“I do expect retaliation, I do expect that these things won’t be easy, but these folks are in it,” Crawford told Truthout. “This is something that makes more sense to them than not standing up for themselves.”
The history of prison camps dates way back to the dawn of time, with victorious battles leading to enslavement and eventual death for the defeated. In the middle ages, these practices moved to trades and ransoms. From those ancient times until now, civilizations have battled on how to properly treat prisoners of war, and Gitmo is no different. www.infographicworld.com has created an infographic exploring the history of prisoners of war, along with the present conditions – and the future – of Gitmo.
Gitmo has a sordid history, which was brought prominently into light after the September 11th attacks. Gitmo is a financial hog, costing $454 million in 2013 alone. Since 2002, the naval station has amassed over $5 billion in total costs to the U.S. Since 2002, 779 prisoners have been held at Gitmo, costing $3 million per prisoner per year.
From political lines, to the overall public perception of the prison, this infographic from www.infographicworld.com covers everything you need to know about Gitmo.
Statistically speaking, Americans should be more fearful of the local cops than “terrorists.”
Though Americans commonly believe law enforcement’s role in society is to protect them and ensure peace and stability within the community, the sad reality is that police departments are often more focused on enforcing laws, making arrests and issuing citations. As a result of this as well as an increase in militarized policing techniques, Americans are eight times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist, estimates a Washington’s Blog report based on official statistical data.
Though the U.S. government does not have a database collecting information about the total number of police involved shootings each year, it’s estimated that between 500 and 1,000 Americans are killed by police officers each year. Since 9/11, about 5,000 Americans have been killed by U.S. police officers, which is almost equivalent to the number of U.S. soldiers who have been killed in the line of duty in Iraq.
Because individual police departments are not required to submit information regarding the use of deadly force by its officers, some bloggers have taken it upon themselves to aggregate that data. Wikipedia also has a list of “justifiable homicides” in the U.S., which was created by documenting publicized deaths.
Mike Prysner, one of the local directors of the Los Angeles chapter for ANSWER — an advocacy group that asks the public to Act Now to Stop War and End Racism — told Mint Press Newsearlier this year that the “epidemic” of police harassment and violence is a nationwide issue.
He said groups like ANSWER are trying to hold officers accountable for abuse of power. “[Police brutality] has been an issue for a very long time,” Prysner said, explaining that in May, 13 people were killed in Southern California by police.
As Mint Press News previously reported, each year there are thousands of claims of police misconduct. According to the CATO Institute’s National Police Misconduct Reporting Project, in 2010 there were 4,861 unique reports of police misconduct involving 6,613 sworn officers and 6,826 alleged victims.
Most of those allegations of police brutality involved officers who punched or hit victims with batons, but about one-quarter of the reported cases involved firearms or stun guns.
Racist policing
A big element in the police killings, Prysner says, is racism. “A big majority of those killed are Latinos and Black people,” while the police officers are mostly White, he said. “It’s a badge of honor to shoot gang members so [the police] go out and shoot people who look like gang members,” Prysner argued, giving the example of 34-year-old Rigoberto Arceo, who was killed by police on May 11.
According to a report from the Los Angeles Times, Arceo, who was a biomedical technician at St. Francis Medical Center, was shot and killed after getting out of his sister’s van. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department says Arceo “advanced on the deputy and attempted to take the deputy’s gun.” However, Arceo’s sister and 53-year-old Armando Garcia — who was barbecuing in his yard when the incident happened — say that Arceo had his hands above his head the entire time.
Prysner is not alone in his assertion that race is a major factor in officer-related violence. This past May, astudy from the the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, an anti-racist activist organization, found that police officers, security guards or self-appointed vigilantes killed at least 313 Black people in 2012 — meaning one Black person was killed in the U.S. by law enforcement roughly every 28 hours.
Prysner said the relationship between police departments and community members needs to change and that when police shoot an unarmed person with their arms in the air over their head, the officer should be punished.
Culture of misconduct
“You cannot have a police force that is investigating and punishing itself,” Prysner said, adding that taxpayer money should be invested into the community instead of given to police to buy more guns, assault rifles and body armor.
Dissatisfied with police departments’ internal review policies, some citizens have formed volunteer police watch groups to prevent the so-called “Blue Code of Silence” effect and encourage police officers to speak out against misconduct occurring within their department.
As Mint Press News previously reported, a report released earlier this year found that of the 439 cases of police misconduct that then had been brought before the Minneapolis’s year-old misconduct review board, not one of the police officers involved has been disciplined.
Although the city of Minneapolis spent $14 million in payouts for alleged police misconduct between 2006 and 2012, despite the fact that the Minneapolis Police Department often concluded that the officers involved in those cases did nothing wrong.
Other departments have begun banning equipment such as Tasers, but those decisions were likely more about protecting the individual departments from lawsuits than ensuring that officers are not equipped with weapons that cause serious and sometimes fatal injuries when used.
To ensure officers are properly educated on how to use their weapons and are aware of police ethics, conflict resolution and varying cultures within a community, police departments have historically heldtraining programs for all officers. But due to tighter budgets and a shift in priorities, many departments have not provided the proper continuing education training programs for their officers.
Charles Ramsey, president of both the Major Cities Chiefs Association and the Police Executive Research Forum, called that a big mistake, explaining that it is essential officers are trained and prepared for high-stress situations:
“Not everybody is going to be able to make those kinds of good decisions under pressure, but I do think that the more reality-based training that we provide, the more we put people in stressful situations to make them respond and make them react.”
GI Joe replaces Carl Winslow
In order to help local police officers protect themselves while fighting the largely unsuccessful War on Drugs, the federal government passed legislation in 1994 allowing the Pentagon to donate surplus military equipment from the Cold War to local police departments. Meaning that “weaponry designed for use on a foreign battlefield has been handed over for use on American streets … against American citizens.”
So while the U.S. military fights the War on Terror abroad, local police departments are fighting another war at home with some of the same equipment as U.S. troops, and protocol that largely favors officers in such tactics as no-knock raids.
Radley Balko, author of “Rise of the Warrior Cop,” wrote in the Wall Street Journal in August:
“Since the 1960s, in response to a range of perceived threats, law-enforcement agencies across the U.S., at every level of government, have been blurring the line between police officer and soldier.
“Driven by martial rhetoric and the availability of military-style equipment—from bayonets and M-16 rifles to armored personnel carriers—American police forces have often adopted a mind-set previously reserved for the battlefield. The war on drugs and, more recently, post-9/11 antiterrorism efforts have created a new figure on the U.S. scene: the warrior cop—armed to the teeth, ready to deal harshly with targeted wrongdoers, and a growing threat to familiar American liberties.”
As Mint Press News previously reported, statistics from an FBI report released in September reveal that a person is arrested on marijuana-related charges in the U.S. every 48 seconds, on average — most were for simple possession charges.
According to the FBI’s report, there were more arrests for marijuana possession than for the violent crimes of murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery and aggravated assault — 658,231 compared with 521,196 arrests.
While groups that advocate against police brutality recognize and believe that law enforcement officials should be protected while on duty, many say that local police officers do not need to wear body armor, Kevlar helmets and tactical equipment vests — all while carrying assault weapons.
“We want the police to keep up with the latest technology. That’s critical,” American Civil Liberties Union senior counsel Kara Dansky said. “But policing should be about protection, not combat.”
According to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, there are more than 900,000 sworn law enforcement officers in the United States. In 2012, 120 officers were killed in the line of duty. The deadliest day in law enforcement history was reportedly Sept. 11, 2001, when 72 officers were killed.
Despite far fewer officers dying in the line of duty compared with American citizens, police departments are not only increasing their use of protective and highly volatile gear, but are increasingly setting aside a portion of their budget to invest in new technology such as drones, night vision goggles, remote robots, surveillance cameras, license plate readers and armored vehicles that amount to unarmed tanks.
Though some officers are on board with the increased militarization and attend conferences such as the annual Urban Shield event, others have expressed concern with the direction the profession is heading.
For example, former Arizona police officer Jon W. McBride said police concerns about being “outgunned” were likely a “self-fulfilling prophecy.” He added that “if not expressly prohibited, police managers will continually push the arms race,” because “their professional literature is predominately [sic] based on the acquiring and use of newer weapons and more aggressive techniques to physically overwhelm the public. In many cases, however, this is the opposite of smart policing.”
“Coupled with the paramilitary design of the police bureaucracy itself, the police give in to what is already a serious problem in the ranks: the belief that the increasing use of power against a citizen is always justified no matter the violation. The police don’t understand that in many instances they are the cause of the escalation and bear more responsibility during an adverse outcome.
“The suspects I encountered as a former police officer and federal agent in nearly all cases granted permission for me to search their property when asked, often despite unconcealed contraband. Now, instead of making a simple request of a violator, many in law enforcement seem to take a more difficult and confrontational path, fearing personal risk. In many circumstances they inflame the citizens they are engaging, thereby needlessly putting themselves in real and increased jeopardy.”
Another former police officer who wished to remain anonymous agreed with McBride and told Balko,
“American policing really needs to return to a more traditional role of cops keeping the peace; getting out of police cars, talking to people, and not being prone to overreaction with the use of firearms, tasers, or pepper spray. … Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been in more than my share tussles and certainly appreciate the dangers of police work, but as Joseph Wambaugh famously said, the real danger is psychological, not physical.”
Release Us – a short film on police brutality by Charles Shaw
NSA says it has no idea how much US info it collects, but FBI searches for it so much it can’t count how many times.
The blowback against the National Security Agency has long focused on the unpopular Patriot Act surveillance program that allows the NSA to vacuum up billions of US phone records each year. But after a rush of attention this week, some much deserved focus is back on the surveillance state’s other seemingly limitless program: the warrantless searches made possible by Section 702 of the Fisa Amendments Act, which allows the NSA to do all sorts of spying on Americans and people around the world – all for reasons that, in most cases, have nothing to do with terrorism.
The long awaited draft report from the independent Privacy and Civil Liberties Board (PCLOB) on this subject was finally released Tuesday night, and it gives Americans a fairly detailed look unclassified at how the NSA spies through its notorious Prism program – and how it snoops “upstream” (a euphemism for the agency’s direct access to entire internet streams at telecoms like AT&T). The board issued a scathing report on the Patriot Act surveillance months ago, but oddly they went the opposite route this time around.
While many of the details are interesting, the board’s new report recommends no systematic changes to the several disturbing privacy issues covered therein. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (my former employer) issued a scathing PCLOB review late Tuesday night, calling the report “legally flawed and factually incomplete” and saying it ignored the “essential privacy problem … that the government has access to or is acquiring nearly all communications that travel over the Internet.”
As usual, it’s the Edward Snowden revelations that give context to all the snooping – and provide the impetus to keep pushing for real reform. Some 36 hours before the latest PCLOB report was made public, the Washington Post’s Ellen Nakashima and Barton Gellman disclosed previously unreleased Snowden documents showing that true scope of “702”-style information sweeps:
Virtually no foreign government is off-limits for the National Security Agency, which has been authorized to intercept information from individuals ‘concerning’ all but four countries on Earth.
As the Post reports, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court’s interpretation of the the Fisa Amendments Act is so broad, it “could allow for surveillance of academics, journalists and human-rights researchers.”
Fisa Amendments Act surveillance also includes scanning the emails of Americans never even accused of a crime. It’s the Snowden revelations that originally led the New York Times to report last year any conversation you’ve ever had with someone outside the country may be fair game under the act, as the NSA “is searching the contents of vast amounts of Americans’ e-mail and text communications into and out of the country who mention information about foreigners under surveillance.”
Perhaps in an attempt to pre-empt the PCLOB report, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper finally just released what he promised Sen Ron Wyden months ago: the number of warrantless searches by the US government on American communications in its vast databases of information collected under the Fisa Amendments Act. This is the second giant problem with 702 surveillance. Wyden refers to these as “backdoor” searches since they’re performed using data supposedly collected for “foreign intelligence” purposes – even though they still suck up huge amounts of purely US information. And it’s exactly the type of search the House overwhelmingly voted to ban in its surprise vote two weeks ago.
The NSA conducted “backdoor” searches 198 times in 2013 (and another 9,500 for internet metadata on Americans). Curiously, the CIA conducts far more warrantless searches of American information in the NSA databases than the NSA itself – almost 10 times more. But the FBI was the worst culprit, querying data on Americans so many times it couldn’t even count. The DNI left it at this: “the FBI believes the number of queries is substantial.”
The FBI has always been the NSA’s silent partner in all its surveillance and has long been suspected of doing the dirty work on Americans’ data after it’s been collected by NSA.
Wyden, who has for years repeatedly pushed for this information to be released to the public, responded:
When the FBI says it conducts a substantial number of searches and it has no idea of what the number is, it shows how flawed this system is and the consequences of inadequate oversight. This huge gap in oversight is a problem now, and will only grow as global communications systems become more interconnected.
The PCLOB also went on to reveal in its report that the FBI can search the vast Prism database for crimes that have nothing to do with terrorism, or even national security. Oh, and how many US persons have had their data collected through Prism and other 702 programs? That government has no idea.
Unfortunately, the PCLOB chickened out of making any real reform proposals, leading Politico’s Josh Gerstein to point out that the Republican-controlled House already endorsed more aggressive reforms than the civil liberties board. More bizarrely, one of the holdouts on the panel for calling for real reform is supposed to be a civil liberties advocate. The Center for Democracy and Technology’s vice president, James Dempsey, had the chance to side with two other, more liberal members on the five-person panel to recommend the FBI get court approval before rummaging through the NSA’s vast databases, but shamefully he didn’t.
Now, as the Senate takes up a weakened House bill along with the House’s strengthened backdoor-proof amendment, it’s time to put focus back on sweeping reform. And while the PCLOB may not have said much in the way of recommendations, now Congress will have to. To help, a coalition of groups (including my current employer, Freedom of the Press Foundation) have graded each and every representative in Washington on the NSA issue. The debate certainly isn’t going away – it’s just a question of whether the public will put enough pressure on Congress to change.
The IRS, currently in the midst of scandals involving the targeting of conservative groups and lavish taxpayer-funded conferences, is ordering surveillance equipment that includes hidden cameras in coffee trays, plants and clock radios.
The IRS wants to secure the surveillance equipment quickly – it posted a solicitation on June 6 and is looking to close the deal by Monday, June 10. The agency already has a company lined up for the order but is not commenting on the details.
“The Internal Revenue Service intends to award a Purchase Order to an undisclosed Corporation,” reads the solicitation.
“If you feel that you can provide the following equipment, please respond to this email no later than 4 days after the solicitation date,” the IRS said.
Among the items the agency will purchase are four “Covert Coffee tray(s) with Camera concealment,” and four “Remote surveillance system(s)” with “Built-in DVD Burner and 2 Internal HDDs, cameras.”
The IRS also is buying four cameras to hide in plants: “(QTY 4) Plant Concealment Color 700 Lines Color IP Camera Concealment with Single Channel Network Server, supports dual video stream, Poe [Power over Ethernet], software included, case included, router included.”
Finishing out the order are four “Color IP Camera Concealment with single channel network server, supports dual video stream, poe, webviewer and cms software included, audio,” and two “Concealed clock radio.”
“Responses to this notice must be received by this office within 3 business days of the date of this synopsis by 2:00 P.M. EST, June 10, 2013,” the IRS said. Interested vendors are to contact Ricardo Carter, a Contract Specialist at the IRS.
“If no compelling responses are received, award will be made to the original solicited corporation,” the IRS said.
The original solicitation was only available to private companies for bids for 19 business hours.
The notice was posted at 11:07 a.m. on June 6 and had a deadline of 2:00 p.m. on Monday. Taking a normal 9-to-5 work week, the solicitation was open for bids for six hours on Thursday, eight hours on Friday, and five hours on Monday, for a total of 19 hours.
The response date was changed on Monday, pushed back to 2:00 p.m. on Tuesday, June 11.
The location listed for the solicitation is the IRS’s National Office of Procurement, in Oxon Hill, Md.
“The Procurement Office acquires the products and services required to support the IRS mission,” according to its website.
In recent weeks the IRS has been at the center of multiple scandals, admitting to targeting Tea Party groups and subjecting them to greater scrutiny when applying for non-profit status during the 2010 and 2012 elections.
A report by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration revealed that groups with names like “patriot” in their titles were singled out, required to complete lengthy personal questionnaires (often multiple times) and having their nonprofit status delayed, sometimes for more than three years.
Last week a second Inspector General report detailed nearly $50 million in wasteful spending by the agency on conferences, in which employees stayed at luxurious Las Vegas hotels, paid a keynote speaker $17,000 to paint a picture of U2 singer Bono, and spent $50,000 on parody videos of “Star Trek.”
Requests for comment from the IRS and Mr. Carter were not returned before this story was posted.
CNSNews.com asked IRS spokesmen Dean Patterson and Anthony Burke to explain the reasoning behind the solicitation, where the surveillance equipment will be used, why the request was so urgent, and whether the request has anything to do with the recent scandals at the IRS.
Will we ever learn the full truth about the Boston Marathon bombing? Personally, I have been looking into this attack for days, and I just keep coming up with more questions than answers. At this point, I honestly have no idea what really happened. Why was a bomb drill being held on the day of the attack? Why have authorities denied that a bomb drill was taking place? Were Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev acting alone? What was the nature of their previous contacts with the FBI and other federal agencies? Why did the FBI at first deny that they had been in contact with the Tsarnaev brothers previously? Why was the investigation of a mysterious Saudi national with familial links to al-Qaeda suddenly dropped shortly after the Saudi ambassador held an unscheduled meeting with Barack Obama? Why did Michelle Obama subsequently visit that mysterious Saudi national in the hospital? If you are looking for answers to these questions, I am afraid that I don’t have them at this point. But what alarms me is that the mainstream media seems to be afraid to ask any of the hard questions that they should be asking. They just seem to swallow whatever the authorities tell them hook, line and sinker without following up on any of the things in this case that simply do not seem to make sense.
So what kinds of questions should they be asking? The following are 17 unanswered questions about the Boston Marathon bombing that the media appears to be afraid to ask…
#1 Why were runners being told that a bomb squad drill was taking place during the Boston Marathon? The following is from an article by Natural News…
Alastair Stevenson is a veteran marathon runner who has competed in dozens of marathons around the world, including the London Marathon. He’s very familiar with the security typically found at marathons, and he immediately noticed something odd about the Boston marathon security.
“They kept making announcements on the loud speaker that it was just a drill and there was nothing to worry about. It seemed like there was some sort of threat, but they kept telling us it was just a drill,” he was quoted as saying by Local15TV.com.
In the interview, you’ll hear Stevenson say:
“At the start at the event, at the Athlete’s Village, there were people on the roof looking down onto the Village at the start. There were dogs with their handlers going around sniffing for explosives, and we were told on a loud announcement that we shouldn’t be concerned and that it was just a drill. And maybe it was just a drill, but I’ve never seen anything like that — not at any marathon that I’ve ever been to. You know, that just concerned me that that’s the only race that I’ve seen in my life where they had dogs sniffing for explosions, and that’s the only place where there had been explosions.”
#2 Why did authorities deny that a bomb squad drill was being held?
#3 According to The Mirror, the FBI is reportedly “hunting” a 12-strong terrorist “sleeper cell” that Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were allegedly a part of…
A source close to the investigation said: “We have no doubt the brothers were not acting alone. The devices used to detonate the two bombs were highly sophisticated and not the kind of thing people learn from Google.
“They were too advanced. Someone gave the brothers the skills and it is now our job to find out just who they were. Agents think the sleeper cell has up to a dozen members and has been waiting several years for their day to come.”
If that is the case, why are authorities in Boston adamantly insisting that the two brothers were acting alone?
#4 CBS News is reporting that the FBI interviewed Tamerlan Tsarnaev back in 2011. The mother of the two Tsarnaev brothers insists that the FBI had been in contact with them for up to five years. At first, the FBI denied any previous contact with the two suspects. Will we ever learn the true scope of the previous relationship between the FBI and the Tsarnaev brothers?
#5 Debka is reporting that the Tsarnaev brothers were “double agents” which had been “hired by US and Saudi intelligence to penetrate the Wahhabi jihadist networks which, helped by Saudi financial institutions, had spread across the restive Russian Caucasian.” Could this possibly be true? If so, will the American people be told the truth about these links?
#6 According to their uncle, there were “mentors” that “radicalized” the Tsarnaev brothers. So precisely who were those “mentors”?
#8 Were the Tsarnaev brothers in contact with a rebel leader named Doku Umarov who is known as “Russia’s Bin Laden”?
#9 Did Tamerlan Tsarnaev post a video on YouTube last summer that expresses a belief that the 12th Imam, Mahdi, will soon come and that an Islamic army with black flags with arise out of a province in Iran known as Khorasan?
#10 Why aren’t we being told that the “pressure cooker bombs” used in the Boston Marathon attacks are very similar to the kind of pressure cooker bombs that are commonly used in the Middle East?…
The Daily Beast has confirmed with U.S. counter-terrorism officials that the bombs placed Monday at the marathon were made from pressure cookers, a crude kind of explosive favored by insurgents in Pakistan and Afghanistan. A recipe for a bomb that uses the pressure cooker was part of the debut issue of Inspire, the English-language online magazine of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
#11 Initially we were told that Saudi national Abdulrahman Ali Alharbi was a “person of interest” in the case. But now he is scheduled to leave the country with the full blessing of the U.S. government. Why is there such a rush to get him out of the United States?
#12 Why aren’t we being told that Abdulrahman Ali Alharbi was photographed with two other Saudis in the vicinity of the Boston marathon bombings?
#13 Why aren’t we being told of the shocking familial links that Abdulrahman Ali Alharbi has to known members of al-Qaeda? The following is from research complied by Walid Shoebat…
Many from Al-Harbi’s clan are steeped in terrorism and are members of Al-Qaeda. Out of a list of 85 terrorists listed by the Saudi government shows several of Al-Harbi clan to have been active fighters in Al-Qaeda:
#15 Badr Saud Uwaid Al-Awufi Al-Harbi
#73 Muhammad Atiq Uwaid Al-Awufi Al-Harbi
#26 Khalid Salim Uwaid Al-Lahibi Al-Harbi
#29 Raed Abdullah Salem Al-Thahiri Al-Harbi
#43 Abdullah Abdul Rahman Muhammad Al-Harbi (leader)
#60 Fayez Ghuneim Humeid Al-Hijri Al-Harbi
Source: http://aalhameed1.net/vb/showthread.php?t=1565
There are specific Saudi clans that are rife with members of Al-Qaeda, which makes it quite alarming as to why nearly a hundred thousand student visas are issued to these. Americans are clueless as to clan ties when it comes to terrorism.
#14 Why did U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry have a private meeting with a Saudi foreign minister shortly after Abdulrahman Ali Alharbi was identified as a potential suspect?
#15 Why did Barack Obama hold an unscheduled meeting with the ambassador from Saudi Arabia shortly after Abdulrahman Ali Alharbi was identified as a potential suspect?
#16 Why did Michelle Obama visit Abdulrahman Ali Alharbi in the hospital?
#17 Why did numerous mainstream media outlets openly suggest that “right-wing extremists” were behind the bombings in the immediate aftermath of the attack?
Photographers are still being classified as potential terrorists in a newly released document from the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI.
The “Roll Call Release,” dated November 13, 2012 and titled “Suspicious Activity Reporting: Photography,” gives a vague reference to a single example where a terrorist may have used cameras to plan attacks.
“In late 2000 and early 2001, convicted al-Qaida operative Dhiren Barot took extensive video footage and numerous photographs of sites in downtown New York City and Washington DC in preparation for planned attacks.”
But then it goes on to list three other examples where people were detained for using cameras in airports, parking garages and shopping malls – which the report describes as “consistent with pre-operational activity and attack planning” – that turned out to have nothing to do with terrorist activity.
But the feds still refer to these detainments as a sign of success because they served for “awareness and training purposes” – as if they need any more training to harass innocent photographers.
And although Barot was convicted of planning attacks, authorities could not connect a video he recorded of the World Trade Center to the actual 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Barot undertook reconnaissance missions in the UK and US in 2000 and 2001, during which he filmed buildings including the International Monetary Fund and World Bank headquarters in Washington DC and the Stock Exchange and Citigroup buildings in New York.
Although there was no evidence that he had foreknowledge of the September 11 attacks on the US, one clip, played in court, showed the World Trade Centre with someone imitating the noise of an explosion in the background.
Barot was also known to visit public libraries to plan possible attacks, so perhaps visiting your local library will soon be regarded as suspicious.
Labeling photographers as potential terrorists has been rampant since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but in 2010, after forcing a man to the ground for video recording a federal courthouse in New York City, the Department of Homeland Security agreed to a settlement, acknowledging that photographing federal buildings is not a crime.
But that still didn’t stop the feds for spreading the message that photographers should be deemed suspicious, including funding municipalities to produce propaganda videos.
Two months ago, it began encouraging citizens to photograph other citizens who take suspicious photographs in order to report them to Homeland Security.
In October, the FBI visited a Houston man at home after he had been seen taking photos near a refinery. He had only been taking pictures of a brewing storm for the National Weather Service.
In 2008, security expert Bruce Schneier wrote his famous “War on Photography” article, in which he stated the following:
Since 9/11, there has been an increasing war on photography. Photographers have been harassed, questioned, detained, arrested or worse, and declared to be unwelcome. We’ve been repeatedly told to watch out for photographers, especially suspicious ones. Clearly any terrorist is going to first photograph his target, so vigilance is required.
Except that it’s nonsense. The 9/11 terrorists didn’t photograph anything. Nor did the London transport bombers, the Madrid subway bombers, or the liquid bombers arrested in 2006. Timothy McVeigh didn’t photograph the Oklahoma City Federal Building. The Unabomber didn’t photograph anything; neither did shoe-bomber Richard Reid. Photographs aren’t being found amongst the papers of Palestinian suicide bombers. The IRA wasn’t known for its photography. Even those manufactured terrorist plots that the US government likes to talk about — the Ft. Dix terrorists, the JFK airport bombers, the Miami 7, the Lackawanna 6 — no photography.
The NDAA should scare the hell out of every American Citizen. This allows the government the authority to secretly arrest Americans, without due process, torture and even murder American citizens without so much as a trial. The National Defense Resources Preparedness allows the president, without going through the U.S. Congress, the ability to seize control of all corporate assets, manufacturing operations, and conscript American civilians into work brigades (i.e. slave labor), seize all food, impose restrictions and rations on all vital resources and to hand these resources to the Department of Homeland Security. Section 201 of this Executive Order allows the president to seize control of all corporate infrastructure, manufacturing operations, control of food, control of farm equipment, control of fuel, control electricity, control of water resources, and control of all civilian transportation.
It is also been documented, ad nauseam, that the existence and operational activation of FEMA camps is now a provable fact as reported by CBS News. Let’s not kid ourselves, FEMA camps are the future concentration camps.
There are many other examples of impending government tyranny that could easily be pointed out here. However, the abovementioned governmental policies are all the proof that America needs to come to the realization that we are all in a great deal of danger and that you, the American middle class, are going to be the targets of this tyrannical oppression.
If elements of your government were not planning to commit genocide against the American people, then why would these policies be enacted? Should we just think that the government doesn’t really mean it when they say they can secretly arrest and murder Americans without following the due process of law under the NDAA? Should we think is just a silly conspiracy theory when we state that Obama has given himself the authority to seize every meaningful asset in this country based solely on his own personal say-so? Is America so dumbed-down to not be able recognize the danger when it’s staring us in the face, The danger is in print, click on the hypertext links and read for yourself that the elite are telling you what they are planning to do to you.
I find it laughable how the country has been conditioned to laugh at any kind of the conspiracy theory, as if two evil man would never get together and conspire to do anything. The refusal of Americans to recognize these dangers, and dismiss them as merely wild-eyed conspiracy theories, speaks to how dumbed down our people have become due to a substandard education system and through the controlled corporate media in which only five corporations own over 95% of the entire media industrial complex.
The Trigger Event
Every act of civil disobedience, every act of revolution and every act of tyrannical genocide committed by government, requires a trigger event. For the Nazis, this trigger event included burning down the Reichstag building and blaming the Communists as an excuse to declare martial law. What will be the trigger event for the coming genocidal holocaust committed against American citizens? No one can say for sure. However, history has proven that government gun confiscation from private citizens are the chest pains prior to the heart attack. In the 20th century, there were 17 major genocides committed against civilian populations resulting in a death toll of around 60 millionpeople. Everyone of these genocides was preceded by gun confiscation which rendered the intended victims defenseless against the slaughter that awaited them.
It is widely known, that Obama is feverishly attempting to usher in the UN Gun Ban Treaty. If he is unable to ram it through Congress, as he is tried before, he is very likely codify gun control through executive order. When gun confiscation comes, it’s time for people like you and I to run for the hills because if you are caught and sent to a FEMA “re-education” camp, you are probably not coming out alive.
Control of communications is also a necessary prerequisite to carry out tyranny against a civilian population. We know that the globalists corporations control 95% of the establishment media. So, that goal has already been accomplished. However the one medium of communication exchange not under the control of the New World Order, is the Internet. In the same proximity of time that we will see gun control introduced into American society on a widespread basis, one can expect the Internet to be taken down and tightly censored as it is in China. The New American Magazine has reported that Obama has given the codes to the DNS servers, for the Internet, to the United Nations. If this is correct, we are not going to have to wait long for this insanity to unfold. And of course, should all else fail, I don’t doubt for a second that this administration will not hesitate to roll out a false flag attack as a prelude to the declaration of martial law and seize American guns under this pretext.
Are You Ready?
Are you ready for the coming tyrannical crackdown and the complete evisceration of our constitutional liberties? Have you taken the proper precautions that will ensure the safety of you and your family? It is not likely that very many of us have taken the any meaningful steps to maximize our chances for survival in what will prove to be humanity’s darkest days. Do you have what it takes to survive in a FEMA camp?
When the FEMA bus rolls into your neighborhood, are you prepared to deal with what lies ahead? Let’s assume for a second that martial law is declared and you were not able to find a safe sanctuary and that you are arrested by the powers that be. Your family will subsequently be separated by the authorities as a prelude to sending you to a FEMA camp, and that means that men will go to one facility, and women will go to another. Children will have their own facility awaiting them. In all likelihood, this will mark the last time you will ever see your family. How do I know this? Read the Rex 84 documents.
Imagine how a man who is deprived of everyone he has ever cared about, and at the same time this man has lost his house and all of his possessions, how will he survive? There are two primary dangers facing detainees. The first is bad luck. The second danger is the loss of hope. Victor Frankl, the renowned psychiatrist, who spent four years in Auschwitz, thought that the loss of hope was the number one factor associated with prisoner mortality in a concentration camp detention situation. How will you find meaning in your life when you’re separated from everything you’ve ever known and loved?
In the previous days as a history instructor, I used to have survivors of the Holocaust come and speak to my students. Subsequently, I asked all of these former death camp prisoners, what was the number one factor in their survival? Almost to a person, they stated the number one factor in their survival was luck. I was told that the Nazis would herd people to the showers which they knew was a death trap, and they were the next in line, but were turned away, because the quota had been met. It just wasn’t their day to die.
If you are sent to a FEMA camp, there are things you can do to exercise control over the things of which you have influence. The Jews were a very resilient people and were able to manufacture their own subculture. There were those, however, they did resist as they ran from the relocation trains, and/or attacked their captors. In almost every instance, resisting authorities at the time of arrest was almost 100% fatal.
For those who arrived at the death camps, a vibrant subculture appeared as the people played cards and actors, musicians, comics, singers, and dancers all entertained small groups who came together for a few hours to forget their daily terror and despair. Singers and poets also perform their craft as well. And of course, people continue to pray even though it was against the rules. People formed bonds with each other, developed a level of affection and respect. In short, they replaced the loss of primary family associations with people facing imminent death every day. The lesson is clear, if you’re ever forced into a FEMA camp, pray for good luck and foster relationships among your fellow detainees and find pleasure in the small things over which you will have some measure of control.
Organized Resistance Within the Camp
What about organizing a resistance in the FEMA camps, would that work? The history lesson which can be derived, from this question, is not promising.In Treblinka, seven hundred Jews were successful in blowing up the camp on August 2, 1943. All but 150 of the inmates perished in retaliation for their efforts. Only 12 Treblinka inmates survived the war. In Sobibor, Jewish and Russian inmates mounted an escape on October 14, 1943. One in ten successfully successfully escaped, about 60 out of 600. The prisoners involved in the escape survived to join the Soviet underground. In Auschwitz, on October 7, 1944, one of the four crematoria was blown up by Jewish workers, whose job it was to clear away the bodies of gas chamber victims. The workers were all caught and killed.
The lesson seems clear, if you allow yourself to be transported to a FEMA camp, you’re probably not coming out alive. Therefore, since resistance within the camp is futile, you have three options. One, do not get caught. Two, you can choose to acquiesce and hope your compliance and your search meaning is successful. Three, you can try to escape. To survive by going along to get along, requires a fair amount of luck to survive. From my perspective, I believe history teaches that mounting an organized escape effort may be the best chance for survival that an inmate has put coming out of the death camp experience, alive.
Will You and Your Community
Resist the Tyranny?
Despite the stereotype which betrays all Jews as willing and meekly going to their slaughter, is not totally accurate. There are plenty of examples where the Jews met force with force and refused to be subjugated. For example, on September 3, 1942, seven hundred Jewish families escaped from the Tuchin Ghetto, located in the Ukraine. However, the Nazis hunted them down, and only 15 survived.
By 1943, the ghetto residents, in the famous Warsaw Ghetto, had organized an army of about 1,000 men, mostly unarmed and without military equipment. In January 1943, German soldiers entered the ghetto to round up more Jews for shipment to the death camps. They were met by a volley of bombs, Molotov cocktails, and a few bullets from the sparse number of firearms which had been smuggled into the ghettos. Twenty German soldiers were killed. The action encouraged a few members of the Polish resistance to support the uprising, and a few machine guns, some hand grenades, and about a hundred rifles and revolvers were smuggled in.
The Germans returned with almost 3,000 crack German troops and eventually overcame the resistance and about 300 Germans were killed. Jewish losses were estimated at 15,000. Some Jews survived and some actually did escape, but not many.
Conclusion
According to the lessons of history, there can be no question that being sent to a concentration camp (i.e. FEMA camp) is an almost certain death sentence. We have seen that resistance at the point of arrest is futile. Armed and organized resistance which includes community involvement, produces long odds for survival, but some do survive. Resisting captors inside of the concentration camp, by an means necessary, is nearly fatal in every case. Acquiescing to authority, while one carves out a life under very dire circumstances, provides the best chance for survival. However, under these conditions, one’s survival is highly dependent on being lucky.
The best chance for survival if you are ever transported to a FEMA camp, is to avoid being caught in the first place. The next part in this series explores how one can best evade capture for both themselves and their family members.
According to a report from the “Combatting Terrorism Center” at West Point, ‘Anti-Federalists’ who oppose a New World Order as well as members of several other far right wing activist groups are potential terrorist threats.
West Point is the U.S. Military Academy that trains, educates, and prepares Cadets for their service in the U.S. Army.
The CTC (Combatting Terrorism Center) at West Point was established following the events on September 11, 2001 because of the belief that strong initiative was needed to prepare Cadets for the new environments they would be headed into upon graduating in the post-9/11 era.
The CTC provides a unique terrorism-based education and since its creation, the program has received international recognition for its studies, reports, and teachings on terrorism and terrorist threats.
A new report from the CTC, however, suggests that far right wing political activists, not radical Islamic groups, are the new terrorist threat in America and even goes so far as to say that those who oppose a ‘New World Order’ are potentially violent terrorists.
One of the groups this report warns of is the modern ‘Anti-Federalist’ group, which the report says contains people who believe the American political system has been hijacked by external forces interested in promoting a ‘New World Order,’ an idea that has even been confirmed by David Rockefeller in his book “Memoirs” [1] and George H.W. Bush in various speeches.
The CTC report goes on to say that these ‘Anti-Federalists’ believe the federal government has become corrupt and tyrannical because of its intrusion on the civil constitutional rights of the American people and support civil activism, individual freedoms, and self-government.
According to the report, these people believe that the push for a tyrannical global government would result in disarming the American people and their violence, the report says, may be directed towards the federal government itself and its proxies in law enforcement.
The FBI and Department of Homeland Security have already released documents which suggest that anyone who has coffee grinders, coffee filters, goggles, and scientific equipment could be involved in creating CBR weapons and should be reported to local authorities.
They have also stated that photographers should be monitored for potential terrorism and they have released guidelinesfor suspicious activity reporting at hotels.
This newly released CTC report, which showcases the exploitation of people like Timothy McVeigh and the small wave of violence from right wing groups in the 1990s to suggest that all right-wingers are potentially violent and even loosely associates those who oppose a one world government with skinheads, Neo-Nazis, and the KKK, is only a small example of the growing paranoia over terrorism and the expanding surveillance state in America.
Why is this all important? Regardless of personal ties to these groups, we must be asking the following question:
WHY WE STAND UP – WHY WE RESIST – WHY WE WILL FIGHT THIS TYRANNY
U.S. Government Using Terrorism Against the American People
Three Ways Obama Carried Bush’s Tyrannical Torch, in Just One Week
DRONE CREEP:How Domestic Drone Use Is Quietly Being Implemented, DHS Loan a Drone
Obama nominates mastermind of controversial drone strike programme as next CIA director
Could Human Enhancement Turn Soldiers Into Weapons That Violate International Law? YES
Gun show sees record turnout; vendors running out of merchandise
America’s Biggest Killers: The Chart Anti-Gunners Don’t Want You To See
BTW – Zero Dark Thirty “Torture is good, even though bad info” “Bin Laden was real, and now he’s dead” Additional Opinions… +What about the SEALs tragedy 2 weeks later?
DH: Wait, this sounds way, way over the top. Are you telling me… [Interrupts]
RB: [Over talk/Unintelligible] …know who was selected or elected twice now. You know who his associates are. And you are saying this is way over the top? Don’t forget what Ayers said – you talked to Larry Grathwohl. This guy is a revolutionary. He does not want to transform our country in the traditional sense. He will destroy it. And he’s not working alone. He’s not working for himself, either. He has his handlers. So don’t think this is going to be a walk in the park, with some type of attempt to rescue the country. Cloward-Piven. Alinsky. Marx. All rolled into one. And he won’t need the rest of his four years to do it.
DH: I need you to be clear. Let’s go back again, I mean, to those who speak out about what’s happening.
RB: [Edit note: Obviously irritated] How much clearer do you want it? The Second Amendment will be gone, along with the first, at least practically or operationally. The Constitution will be gone, suspended, at least in an operational sense. Maybe they won’t actually say that they are suspending it, but will do it. Like saying the sky is purple when it’s actually blue. How many people will look a the sky and say yeah, it’s purple? They see what they want to see.
So the DHS, working with other law enforcement organizations, especially the TSA as it stands right now, will oversee the confiscation of assault weapons, which includes all semi-automatic weapons following a period of so-called amnesty. It also includes shotguns that hold multiple rounds, or have pistol grips. They will go after the high capacity magazines, anything over, say 5 rounds.
They will also go after the ammunition, especially at the manufacturer’s level. They will require a special license for certain weapons, and make it impossible to own anything. More draconian than England. This is a global thing too. Want to hunt? What gives you the right to hunt their animals? Sound strange? I hope so, but they believe they own the animals. Do you understand now, how sick and twisted this is? Their mentality?
The obvious intent is to disarm American citizens. They will say that we’ll still be able to defend ourselves and go hunting, but even that will be severely regulated. This is the part that they are still working out, though. While the plans were made years ago, there is some argument over the exact details. I know that Napalitano, even with her support of the agenda, would like to see this take place outside of an E.O. [Executive Order] in favor of legislative action and even with UN involvement.
DH: But UN involvement would still require legislative approval.
RB: Yes, but your still thinking normal – in normal terms. Stop thinking about a normal situation. The country is divided, which is exactly where Obama wants us to be. We are as ideologically divided as we were during the Civil War and that rift is growing every day. Add in a crisis – and economic crisis – where ATM and EBT cards will stop working. Where bank accounts will contain nothing but air. They are anticipating a revolution and a civil war rolled into one (emphasis added by this author).
Imagine when talk show hosts or Bloggers or some other malcontent gets on the air or starts writing about the injustice of it all, and about how Obama is the anti-Christ or something. They will outlaw such talk or writing as inciting the situation – they will make it illegal by saying that it is causing people to die. The Republicans will go along with everything as it’s – we have – a one party system. Two parties is an illusion. It’s all so surreal to talk about but you see where this is headed, right?
DH: Well, what about the lists?
RB: Back to that again, okay. Why do you think the NSA has surveillance of all communications? To identify and stop terrorism? Okay, to be fair, that is part of it, but not the main reason. The federal agencies have identified people who present a danger to them and their agendas. I don’t know if they are color coded like you mentioned, red blue purple or peach mango or whatever, but they exist. In fact, each agency has their own. You know, why is it so [deleted] hard for people to get their heads around the existence of lists with names of people who pose a threat to their plans? The media made a big deal about Nixon’s enemies list and everyone nodded and said yeah, that [deleted], but today? They’ve been around for years and years.
DH: I think it’s because of the nature of the lists today. What do they plan to do with their enemies?
RB: Go back to what Ayers said when, in the late 60’s? 70’s? I forget. Anyway, he was serious. But to some extent, the same thing that happened before. They – the people on some of these lists – are under surveillance, or at least some, and when necessary, some are approached and made an offer. Others, well, they can be made to undergo certain training. Let’s call it sensitivity training, except on a much different level. Others, most that are the most visible and mainstream are safe for the most part. And do you want to know why? It’s because they are in the pockets of the very people we are talking about, but they might or might not know it. Corporate sponsorship – follow the money. You know the drill. You saw it happen before, with the birth certificate.
It’s people that are just under the national radar but are effective. They have to worry. Those who have been publicly marginalized already but continue to talk or write or post, they are in trouble. It’s people who won’t sell out, who think that they can make a difference. Those are the people who have to worry.
Think about recent deaths that everybody believes were natural or suicides. Were they? People are too busy working their [butts] off to put food on the table to give a damn about some guy somewhere who vapor locks because of too many doughnuts and coffee and late nights. And it seems plausible enough to happen. This time, when everything collapses, do you think they will care if it is a bullet or a heart attack that takes out the opposition? [Deleted] no.
DH: That’s disturbing. Do you… [interrupts]
RB: Think about the Oklahoma City bombing in ’95. Remember how Clinton blamed that on talk radio, or at least in part. Take what happened then and put it in context of today. Then multiply the damnation by 100, and you will begin to understand where this is going. People like Rush and Hannity have a narrow focus of political theater. They’ll still be up and running during all of this to allow for the appearance of normal. Stay within the script, comrade.
But as far as the others, they have certain plans. And these plans are becoming more transparent. They are getting bolder. They are pushing lies, and the bigger the lie, the easier it is to sell to the people. They will even try to sell a sense of normalcy as things go absolutely crazy and break down. It will be surreal. And some will believe it, think that it’s only happening in certain places, and we can draw everything back once the dust settles. But when it does, this place will not be the same.
DH: Will there be resistance within the ranks of law enforcement? You know, will some say they won’t go along with the plan, like the Oath Keepers?
RB: Absolutely. But they will not only be outnumbered, but outgunned – literally. The whole objective is to bring in outside forces to deal with the civil unrest that will happen in America. And where does their allegiance lie? Certainly not to Sheriff Bob. Or you or me.
During all of this, and you’ve got to remember that the dollar collapse is a big part of this, our country is going to have to be redone. I’ve seen – personally – a map of North America without borders. Done this year. The number 2015 was written across the top, and I believe that was meant as a year. Along with this map – in the same area where this was – was another map showing the United States cut up into sectors. I’m not talking about what people have seen on the internet, but something entirely different. Zones. And a big star on the city of Denver.
Sound like conspiracy stuff on the Internet? Yup. But maybe they were right. It sure looks that way. It will read that way if you decide to write about this. Good luck with that. Anyway, the country seemed to be split into sectors, but not the kind shown on the internet. Different.
DH: What is the context of that?
RB: Across the bottom of this was written economic sectors. It looked like a work in progress, so I can’t tell you any more than that. From the context I think it has to do with the collapse of the dollar.
DH: Why would DHS have this? I mean, it seems almost contrived, doesn’t it?
RB: Not really, when you consider the bigger picture. But wait before we go off into that part. I need to tell you about Obamacare, you know, the new health care coming up. It plays a big part – a huge [deleted] part in the immediate reshaping of things.
DH: How so?
RB: It creates a mechanism of centralized control over people. That’s the intent of this monster of a bill, not affordable health care. And it will be used to identify gun owners. Think your health records are private? Have you been to the doctor lately? Asked about owning a gun? Why do you think they ask, do you think they care about your safety? Say yes to owning a gun and your information is shared with another agency, and ultimately, you will be identified as a security risk. The records will be matched with other agencies.
You think that they are simply relying on gun registration forms? This is part of data collection that people don’t get. Oh, and don’t even think about getting a script for some mood enhancement drug and being able to own a gun.
Ayers and Dohrn are having the times of their lives seeing things they’ve worked for all of their adult lives actually coming to pass. Oh, before I forget, look at the recent White House visitor logs.
DH: Why? Where did that come from?
RB: Unless they are redacted, you will see the influence of Ayers. Right now. The Weather Underground has been reborn. So has their agenda.
DH: Eugenics? Population control?
RB: Yup. And re-education camps. But trust me, you write about this, you’ll be called a kook. It’s up to you, it’s your reputation, not mine. And speaking about that, you do know that this crew is using the internet to ruin people, right? They are paying people to infiltrate discussion sites and forums to call people like you idiots. Show me the proof they say. Why doesn’t you source come forward? If he knows so much, why not go to Fox or the media? To them, if it’s not broadcast on CNN, it’s not real. Well, they’ve got it backwards. Very little on the news is real. The stock market, the economy, the last presidential polls, very little is real.
But this crew is really internet savvy. They’ve got a lot of people they pay to divert issues on forums, to mock people, to marginalize them. They know what they’re doing. People think they’ll take sites down – hack them. Why do that when they are more effective to infiltrate the discussion? Think about the birth certificate, I mean the eligibility problem of Obama. Perfect example.
DH: How soon do you see things taking place?
RB: They already are in motion. If you’re looking for a date I can’t tell you. Remember, the objectives are the same, but plans, well, they adapt. They exploit. Watch how this fiscal cliff thing plays out. This is the run-up to the next beg economic event. I can’t give you a date. I can tell you to watch things this spring. Start with the inauguration and go from there. Watch the metals, when they dip. It will be a good indication that things are about to happen. I got that little tidbit from my friend at [REDACTED].
NOTE: At this point, my contact asked me to reserve further disclosures until after the inauguration.
A short interview broadcast by CNN late last week featuring two participants – a Palestinian in Gaza and an Israeli within range of the rocket attacks – did not follow the usual script.
For once, a media outlet dropped its role as gatekeeper, there to mediate and therefore impair our understanding of what is taking place between Israel and the Palestinians, and inadvertently became a simple window on real events.
The usual aim of such “balance” interviews relating to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is twofold: to reassure the audience that both sides of the story are being presented fairly; and to dissipate potential outrage at the deaths of Palestinian civilians by giving equal time to the suffering of Israelis.
But the deeper function of such coverage in relation to Gaza, given the media’s assumption that Israeli bombs are simply a reaction to Hamas terror, is to redirect the audience’s anger exclusively towards Hamas. In this way, Hamas is made implicitly responsible for the suffering of both Israelis and Palestinians.
The dramatic conclusion to CNN’s interview appears, however, to have otherwise trumped normal journalistic considerations.
The pre-recorded interview via Skype opened with Mohammed Sulaiman in Gaza. From what looked like a cramped room, presumably serving as a bomb shelter, he spoke of how he was too afraid to step outside his home. Throughout the interview, we could hear the muffled sound of bombs exploding in the near-distance. Mohammed occasionally glanced nervously to his side.
The other interviewee, Nissim Nahoom, an Israeli official in Ashkelon, also spoke of his family’s terror, arguing that it was no different from that of Gazans. Except in one respect, he hastened to add: things were worse for Israelis because they had to live with the knowledge that Hamas rockets were intended to harm civilians, unlike the precision missiles and bombs Israel dropped on Gaza.
The interview returned to Mohammed. As he started to speak, the bombing grew much louder. He pressed on, saying he would not be silenced by what was taking place outside. The interviewer, Isha Sesay, interrupted – seemingly unsure of what she was hearing – to inquire about the noise.
Then, with an irony that Mohammed could not have appreciated as he spoke, he began to say he refused to be drawn into a comparison about whose suffering was worse when an enormous explosion threw him from his chair and severed the internet connection. Switching back to the studio, Sesay reassured viewers that Mohammed had not been hurt.
The bombs, however, spoke more eloquently than either Mohammed or Nissim.
If Mohammed had had more time, he might have been able to challenge Nissim’s point about Israelis’ greater fears as well as pointing to another important difference between his and his Israeli interlocutor’s respective plights.
The far greater accuracy of Israel’s weaponry in no way confers peace of mind. The fact is that a Palestinian civilian in Gaza is in far more danger of being killed or injured by one of Israel’s precision armaments than an Israeli is by one of the more primitive rockets being launched out of Gaza.
In Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s attack on Gaza in winter 2008-09, three Israelis were killed by rocket attacks, and six soldiers died in fighting. In Gaza, meanwhile, nearly 1,400 Palestinians were killed, of whom at least 1,000 were not involved in hostilities, according to the Israeli group B’Tselem. Many, if not most, of those civilians were killed by so-called precision bombs and missiles.
If Israelis like Nissim really believe they have to endure greater suffering because the Palestinians lack accurate weapons, then maybe they should start lobbying Washington to distribute its military hardware more equitably, so that the Palestinians can receive the same allocations of military aid and armaments as Israel.
Or alternatively, they could lobby their own government to allow Iran and Hizbullah to bring into Gaza more sophisticated technology than can currently be smuggled in via the tunnels.
The other difference is that, unlike Nissim and his family, most people in Gaza have nowhere else to flee. And the reason that they must live under the rain of bombs in one of the most densely populated areas on earth is because Israel – and to a lesser extent Egypt – has sealed the borders to create a prison for them.
Israel has denied Gaza a port, control of its airspace and the right of its inhabitants to move to the other Palestinian territory recognised by the Oslo accords, the West Bank. It is not, as Israel’s supporters allege, that Hamas is hiding among Palestinian civilians; rather, Israel has forced Palestinian civilians to live in a tiny strip of land that Israel turned into a war zone.
So who is chiefly to blame for the escalation that currently threatens the nearly two million inhabitants of Gaza? Though Hamas’ hands are not entirely clean, there are culprits far more responsible than the Palestinian militants.
First culprit: The state of Israel
The inciting cause of the latest confrontation between Israel and Hamas has little to do with the firing of rockets, whether by Hamas or the other Palestinian factions.
The conflict predates the rockets – and even the creation of Hamas – by decades. It is the legacy of Israel’s dispossession of Palestinians in 1948, forcing many of them from their homes in what is now Israel into the tiny Gaza Strip. That original injustice has been compounded by the occupation Israel has not only failed to end but has actually intensified in recent years with its relentless siege of the small strip of territory.
Israel has been progressively choking the life out of Gaza, destroying its economy, periodically wrecking its infrastructure, denying its inhabitants freedom of movement and leaving its population immiserated.
One only needs to look at the restrictions on Gazans’ access to their own sea. Here we are not considering their right to use their own coast to leave and enter their territory, simply their right to use their own waters to feed themselves. According to one provision of the Oslo accords, Gaza was given fishing rights up to 20 miles off its shore. Israel has slowly whittled that down to just three miles, with Israeli navy vessels firing on fishing boats even inside that paltry limit.
Palestinians in Gaza are entitled to struggle for their right to live and prosper. That struggle is a form of self-defence – not aggression – against occupation, oppression, colonialism and imperialism.
Second culprit: Binyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak
The Israeli prime minister and defence minister have taken a direct and personal hand, above and beyond Israel’s wider role in enforcing the occupation, in escalating the violence.
Israel and its supporters always make it their first priority when Israel launches a new war of aggression to obscure the timeline of events as a way to cloud responsibility. The media willingly regurgitates such efforts at misdirection.
In reality, Israel engineered a confrontation to provide the pretext for a “retaliatory” attack, just as it did four years earlier in Operation Cast Lead. Then Israel broke a six-month ceasefire agreed with Hamas by staging a raid into Gaza that killed six Hamas members.
This time, on 8 November, Israel achieved the same end by invading Gaza again, on this occasion following a two-week lull in tensions. A 13-year-old boy out playing football was killed by an Israeli bullet.
Tit-for-tat violence over the following days resulted in the injury of eight Israelis, including four soldiers, and the deaths of five Palestinian civilians, and the wounding of dozens more in Gaza.
On November 12, as part of efforts to calm things down, the Palestinian militant factions agreed a truce that held two days – until Israel broke it by assassinating Hamas military leader Ahmed Jabari. The rockets out of Gaza that followed these various Israeli provocations have been misrepresented as the casus belli.
But if Netanyahu and Barak are responsible for creating the immediate pretext for an attack on Gaza, they are also criminally negligent for failing to pursue an opportunity to secure a much longer truce with Hamas.
We now know, thanks to Israeli peace activist Gershon Baskin, that in the period leading up to Jabari’s execution Egypt had been working to secure a long-term truce between Israel and Hamas. Jabari was apparently eager to agree to it.
Baskin, who was intimately involved in the talks, was a credible conduit between Israel and Hamas because he had played a key role last year in getting Jabari to sign off on a prisoner exchange that led to the release of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. Baskin noted in the Haaretz newspaper that Jabari’s assassination “killed the possibility of achieving a truce and also the Egyptian mediators’ ability to function.”
The peace activist had already met Barak to alert him to the truce, but it seems the defence minister and Netanyahu had more pressing concerns than ending the tensions between Israel and Hamas.
What could have been more important than finding a mechanism for saving lives, on both the Palestinian and Israeli sides. Baskin offers a clue: “Those who made the decision must be judged by the voters, but to my regret they will get more votes because of this.”
It seems Israel’s general election, due in January, was uppermost in the minds of Netanyahu and Barak.
A lesson learnt by Israeli leaders over recent years, as Baskin notes, is that wars are vote-winners solely for the right wing. That should be clear to no one more than Netanyahu. He has twice before become prime minister on the back of wars waged by his more “moderate” political opponents as they faced elections.
Shimon Peres, a dove by no standard except a peculiar Israeli one, launched an attack on Lebanon, Operation Grapes of Wrath, that cost him the election in 1996. And centrists Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni again helped Netanyahu to victory by attacking Gaza in late 2008.
Israelis, it seems, prefer a leader who does not bother to wrap a velvet glove around his iron fist.
Netanyahu was already forging ahead in the polls before he minted Operation Pillar of Defence. But the electoral fortunes of Ehud Barak, sometimes described as Netanyahu’s political Siamese twin and a military mentor to Netanyahu from their commando days together, have been looking grim indeed.
Barak desperately needed a military rather than a political campaign to boost his standing and get his renegade Independence party across the electoral threshold and into the Israeli parliament. It seems Netanyahu, thinking he had little to lose himself from an operation in Gaza, may have been willing to oblige.
Third culprit: The Israeli army
Israel’s army has become addicted to two doctrines it calls the “deterrence principle” and its “qualitative military edge”. Both are fancy ways of saying that, like some mafia heavy, the Israeli army wants to be sure it alone can “whack” its enemies. Deterrence, in Israeli parlance, does not refer to a balance of fear but Israel’s exclusive right to use terror.
The amassing of rockets by Hamas, therefore, violates the Israeli army’s own sense of propriety, just as Hizbullah’s stockpiling does further north. Israel wants its neighbouring enemies to have no ability to resist its dictates.
Doubtless the army was only too ready to back Netanyahu and Barak’s electioneering if it also provided an opportunity to clean out some of Hamas’ rocket arsenal.
But there is another strategic reason why the Israeli army has been chomping at the bit to crack down on Hamas again.
Haaretz’s two chief military correspondents explained the logic of the army’s position last week, shortly after Israel killed Jabari. They reported: “For a long time now Israel has been pursuing a policy of containment in the Gaza Strip, limiting its response to the prolonged effort on the part of Hamas to dictate new rules of the game surrounding the fence, mainly in its attempt to prevent the entry of the IDF into the ‘perimeter,’ the strip of a few hundred meters wide to the west of the fence.”
In short, Hamas has angered Israeli commanders by refusing to sit quietly while the army treats large areas of Gaza as its playground and enters at will.
Israel has created what it terms a “buffer zone” inside the fence around Gaza, often up to a kilometre wide, that Palestinians cannot enter but the Israeli army can use as a gateway for launching its “incursions”. Remote-controlled guns mounted on Israeli watch-towers around Gaza can open fire on any Palestinian who is considered to have approached too close.
Three incidents shortly before Jabari’s extra-judicial execution illustrate the struggle for control over Gaza’s interior.
On November 4, the Israeli army shot dead a young Palestinian man inside Gaza as he was reported to have approached the fence. Palestinians say he was mentally unfit and that he could have been saved by medics had ambulances not been prevented from reaching him for several hours.
On November 8, as already noted, the Israeli army made an incursion into Gaza to attack Palestinian militants and in the process shot dead a boy playing football.
And on November 10, two days later, Palestinian fighters fired an anti-tank missile that destroyed a Jeep patrolling the perimeter fence around Gaza, wounding four soldiers.
As the Haaretz reporters note, Hamas appears to be trying to demonstrate that it has as much right to defend its side of the “border fence” as Israel does on the other side.
The army’s response to this display of native impertinence has been to inflict a savage form of collective punishment on Gaza to remind Hamas who is boss.
Fourth culprit: the White House
It is near-impossible to believe that Netanyahu decided to revive Israel’s policy of extra-judicial executions of Hamas leaders – and bystanders – without at least consulting the White House. Israel clearly also held off from beginning its escalation until after the US elections, restricting itself, as it did in Cast Lead, to the “downtime” in US politics between the elections and the presidential inauguration.
That was designed to avoid overly embarrassing the US president. A fair assumption must be that Barack Obama approved Israel’s operation in advance. Certainly he has provided unstinting backing since, despite the wildly optimistic scenarios painted by some analysts that he was likely to seek revenge on Netanyahu in his second term.
Also, it should be remembered that Israel’s belligerence towards Gaza, and the easing of domestic pressure on Israel to negotiate with Hamas or reach a ceasefire, has largely been made possible because Obama forced US taxpayers to massively subsidise Israel’s rocket interception system, Iron Dome, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Iron Dome is being used to shoot down rockets out of Gaza that might otherwise have landed in built-up areas of Israel. Israel and the White House have therefore been able to sell US munificence on the interception of rockets as a humanitarian gesture.
But the reality is that Iron Dome has swung Israel’s cost-benefit calculus sharply in favour of greater aggression because it is has increased Israel’s sense of impunity. Whatever Hamas’ ability to smuggle into Gaza more sophisticated weaponry, Israel believes it can neutralise that threat using interception systems.
Far from being a humanitarian measure, Iron Dome has simply served to ensure that Gaza will continue to suffer a far larger burden of deaths and injuries in confrontations with Israel and that such confrontations will continue to occur regularly.
Here are the four main culprits. They should be held responsible for the deaths of Palestinians and Israelis in the days and, if Israel expands its operation, weeks ahead.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His new website is www.jonathan-cook.net.
In order to help local police officers protect themselves while fighting the largely unsuccessful War on Drugs, the federal government passed legislation in 1994 allowing the Pentagon to 
