The Militant Libertarian

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Thursday, November 19, 2009

U.S. Military Employs “Counterinsurgency” Strategy In Californian City

by Paul Joseph Watson

The U.S. military is aiding police in a California conduct “counterinsurgency” operations as part of a crack down on gang related violence in the city of Salinas, a relationship officials admit pushes the boundaries of the constitutional bar on the military operating within U.S. borders but one that should be expanded nationwide.

“Since February, combat veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan have been advising Salinas police on counterinsurgency strategy, bringing lessons from the battlefield to the meanest streets in an American city,” reports the Washington Post.

“This is our surge,” said (Mayor) Donohue, who solicited the assistance from the elite Naval Postgraduate School, 20 miles and a world away in Monterey. “When the public heard about this, they thought we were going to send the Navy SEALs into Salinas.”

The head of the program, former Special Forces career officer Col. Hy Rothstein, who oversaw counterinsurgency operations in Colombia and Central America, describes the program as a “laboratory”. The Washington Post article implies that the members of his team are retired veterans, yet later admits that the men are “mostly naval officers taking time between deployments,” meaning that they are active duty, not retired.

Another slick form of spin on behalf of the Post is the claim that the program doesn’t violate constitutional blocks on the military engaging in domestic law enforcement because Rothstein’s team are helping on a “voluntary” basis. This is completely contradicted in the second paragraph of the article when it is admitted that Mayor Dennis Donohue “affirmed his decision to seek help from an unlikely source: the U.S. military,” meaning that the program isn’t voluntary at all, the Mayor of the city instigated the military’s involvement. At the end of the article, a nationwide version of the program is also advocated.

Rothstein explains how his team employ methods used against insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan to get the job done in Salinas, using military software that “tracks crimes and links suspects and their associates by social, geographic and family connections”.

Rothstein also admitted how part of the program utilizes military psyops tactics to thwart the public from hearing “negative messages,” suggesting control of the local media.

The Post article goes into great depth to depict the town as being under siege from dangerous Hispanic gang members in an attempt to push the justification of military involvement. At no point is it mentioned that if the police were tough enough to deal with real criminals in the first place, rather than feeding on the fat hog of the law-abiding American taxpayer, the need for army involvement would have never arisen.

How many stories do you read every week about women, people in wheelchairs, people with mental problems and other easy pray being tased by cops in comparison to gang members and drug dealers? Perhaps if the cops concentrated on going after the thugs rather than sinking their teeth into the fat, dumb and happy middle class American, then cities like Salinas wouldn’t be full of gang-banger scum.

The crucial part of the Post article is right at the end, when the trial balloon goes up for the U.S. military’s involvement in domestic law enforcement to be implemented nationwide in this context.

“The $1 trillion invested so far in Iraq and Afghanistan could pay a dividend in American streets,” states the article, before quoting Leonard A. Ferrari, provost of the Naval Postgraduate School, who states, “The idea was, not just Salinas, but is there a national model for this?”

Why is one of the biggest newspapers in America, a Bilderberg-owned publication, pushing for the nationwide use of active duty U.S. military units in domestic law enforcement, specifically to combat a “counterinsurgency” amongst U.S. citizens? Is this another progression in the preparation for martial law in response to mass civil unrest, race riots, and even a future civil war?

Or is this merely another gradual blurring of the lines between the police and the military as an ailing banana republic begins to decline into a failed state bossed by a militarized dictatorship?

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