The War at Home: We Are the Enemy in State of Undeclared Martial Law

It needs to be noted right off the bat that John Whitehead isn’t exactly a weepy, bleeding-heart, Obama supporting,  liberal whiner. It was after all his Rutherford Institute that provided legal assistance to Paula Jones in her lawsuit against the sexual depravity of former president Bill Clinton.  The man has serious gravitas as a conservative so when he comes out with a blistering critique of the militarized police state it merits paying attention.  With the now typical divisiveness that only benefits the elite that is arising out of the events in Ferguson, Missouri splitting the country into warring factions yet again, Whitehead hits the target on the most important of all issues. The transformation of America into a nascent totalitarian police state.

Mr. Whitehead has for years been writing of the dangers of incipient American fascism and smacks it out of the ballpark in his latest piece entitled "Turning America Into a War Zone, Where ‘We the People’ Are the Enemy" in which he writes:

What Americans must understand, what we have chosen to ignore, what we have fearfully turned a blind eye to lest the reality prove too jarring is the fact that we no longer live in the “city on the hill,” a beacon of freedom for all the world.

Far from being a shining example of democracy at work, we have become a lesson for the world in how quickly freedom turns to tyranny, how slippery the slope by which a once-freedom-loving people can be branded, shackled and fooled into believing that their prisons walls are, in fact, for their own protection.

Having spent more than half a century exporting war to foreign lands, profiting from war, and creating a national economy seemingly dependent on the spoils of war, we failed to protest when the war hawks turned their profit-driven appetites on us, bringing home the spoils of war—the military tanks, grenade launchers, Kevlar helmets, assault rifles, gas masks, ammunition, battering rams, night vision binoculars, etc.—to be distributed for free to local police agencies and used to secure the homeland against “we the people.”

It’s not just the Defense Department that is passing out free military equipment to local police. Since the early 1990s, the Justice Department has worked with the Pentagon to fund military technology for police departments. And then there are the billions of dollars’ worth of federal grants distributed by the Department of Homeland Security, enabling police departments to go on a veritable buying spree for highly questionable military-grade supplies better suited to the battlefield.

Is it any wonder that we now find ourselves in the midst of a war zone?

We live in a state of undeclared martial law. We have become the enemy.

In a war zone, there are no police—only soldiers. Thus, there is no more Posse Comitatus prohibiting the government from using the military in a law enforcement capacity. Not when the local police have, for all intents and purposes, already become the military.

In a war zone, the soldiers shoot to kill, as American police have now been trained to do. Whether the perceived “threat” is armed or unarmed no longer matters when police are authorized to shoot first and ask questions later. 

Interestingly and very ominously, the divisiveness over the shooting of the unarmed teenage thug Michael Brown and the overwhelming response of militarized police to protests are not only splitting into the standard black versus white. We are increasingly seeing a division between those who find it acceptable and actually preferential to live under the red, white and blue jackboot of apple pie authoritarianism and those who are finally, like John Whitehead, saying that enough is enough.

The Whitehead piece riffs off of an article gone viral, written by a Los Angeles police veteran named Sunil Dutta who has now become the poster boy for the American police state. In the piece, Dutta proclaims that “If you don’t want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you." It is the ultimate declaration of the blue supremacy that has metastasized through American law-enforcement like a cancer. Dutta's declaration of police godhood ran in the Washington Post and is entitled "I’m a cop. If you don’t want to get hurt, don’t challenge me."

The piece has drawn both deserved condemnation as well as praise from those who have a skewed idea of what it is to live in a free country with a system of legal checks and balances. No matter how much that the U.S. Constitution has been gutted by Clinton, Bush and Obama it is still the only document that truly matters if we are to still live in that shining city on the hill as President Ronald Reagan liked to refer to America.

More terrifying than the militarized police and the "undeclared state of martial law" that Rutherford refers to is that so many are lining up in lockstep unity behind the government goon squads. There will always be those who support the hard-liners, skull-crackers, knuckle-draggers and whichever alpha male politician emerges from the pack to lead them. There is a certain percentage of those who are prone to authoritarianism in every society. These types have been chronicled in many a work including Eric Hoffer's "The True Believer" of which President Dwight D. Eisenhower reportedly was a fan. Ike truly understood the dangers of fascism from a real first hand perspective as the Supreme Commander of the American forces that defeated the Nazis. He also understood the menace of the Military Industrial Complex which he famously warned of in his farewell address - the American police state is the bastard child of this.

The true believers, the authority worshippers and the adherents of the cult of the uniform are of particular danger in these twisted times but even worse are the apathetic and clueless Americans, the sheeple as they are often referred to. Whitehead also addresses them in  "Turning America Into a War Zone, Where ‘We the People’ Are the Enemy":

You see, what Americans have failed to comprehend, living as they do in a TV-induced, drug-like haze of fabricated realities, narcissistic denial, and partisan politics, is that we’ve not only brought the military equipment used in Iraq and Afghanistan home to be used against the American people. We’ve also brought the very spirit of the war home.

This is what it feels like to be a conquered people. This is what it feels like to be an occupied nation. This is what it feels like to live in fear of armed men crashing through your door in the middle of the night, or to be accused of doing something you never even knew was a crime, or to be watched all the time, your movements tracked, your motives questioned.

This is what it’s like to be a citizen of the American police state. This is what it’s like to be an enemy combatant in your own country.

So if you don’t want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, by all means, stand down. Cower in the face of the police, turn your eyes away from injustice, find any excuse to suggest that the so-called victims of the police state deserved what they got.

But remember, when that rifle finally gets pointed in your direction—and it will—when there’s no one left to stand up for you or speak up for you, remember that you were warned.

The window of opportunity to stop - or at least slow the momentum of the juggernaut - is rapidly closing. People should heed the warnings of patriotic Americans such as John Whitehead instead of sitting on their couches and just tuning out. It will be too late when their doors are kicked down by militarized police shock troops in the middle of Dancing With the Stars.

Militarized Police Turn Ferguson Missouri Into a War Zone

The militarized police have essentially declared the city of Ferguson, Missouri to be a war zone. Ferguson, which lies suburbs of St. Louis erupted into street protests after the police gunned down 18 year old Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager. The militarized police in America have become increasingly violent in the post 9/11 era and Brown's shooting pushed many in Ferguson over the edge. The uprising unfortunately included the standard destruction as well as the idiotic and inevitable looting that criminal elements so often engage in during such outbursts of chaos. Those who dismiss this simply as black people behaving badly are missing the larger point. American police forces have been fully weaponized against those who they were once tasked with serving and protecting and many now view the public as enemies. Welcome to The Homeland.

The Ferguson riots began when citizens marched on police headquarters demanding charges against the cop who blew away the young Brown and things just spiraled out of control from there. As of Tuesday, the paramilitary shock troops were out in force, according to accounts journalists were banned and the FAA even went so far as to actually implement a no-fly zone over Ferguson. According to a tweet from journalist Radley Balko who now has a regular column in the Washington Post:

Summary of scary shit: Heavily militarized police presence in Ferguson. Protests banned. Journalists threatened. News helicopters barred. 

Balko is the author of the book "Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces" and has been warning of the dangers of transforming domestic law enforcement into paramilitary shock troops. In his article "A Decade After 9/11, Police Departments are Increasingly Militarized” Balko wrote that:

The September 11 attacks provided a new and seemingly urgent justification for further militarization of America's police departments: the need to protect the country from terrorism.

Within months of the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, the Office of National Drug Control Policy began laying the groundwork with a series of ads (featured most prominently during the 2002 Super Bowl) tying recreational drug use to support for terrorism. Terrorism became the new reason to arm American cops as if they were soldiers, but drug offenders would still be their primary targets.

In 2004, for example, law enforcement officials in the New York counties of Oswego and Cayuga defended their new SWAT teams as a necessary precaution in a post–September 11 world. “We’re in a new era, a new time," here,” one sheriff told the Syracuse Post Standard. “The bad guys are a little different than they used to be, so we’re just trying to keep up with the needs for today and hope we never have to use it.” The same sheriff said later in the same article that he'd use his new SWAT team “for a lot of other purposes, too ... just a multitude of other things." In 2002, the seven police officers who serve the town of Jasper, Florida -- which had all of 2,000 people and hadn’t had a murder in more than a decade -- were each given a military-grade M-16 machine gun from the Pentagon transfer program, leading one Florida paper to run the headline, “Three Stoplights, Seven M-16s.”

The fact is that American law-enforcement has mutated into legions of paramilitary goons. They are supported by the feds who have been throwing money and surplus war zone equipment into cities and municipalities. There is also a growing  "us versus them" mentality instilled in many of the cops. The conditions are ripe now for the rolling out of domestic martial law in at least a limited capacity in the event of an always vaguely defined "emergency".  It could be an outbreak of the Ebola virus that our genius leadership allowed into the country, or there could be war with the nuclear power Russia, a collapse of the rigged financial markets or as strident fear-mongers like Senator Lindsey Graham are trumpeting: a domestic terrorist attack by jihadist group ISIS. The state is just itching for a fight and as we saw the week of the Boston Marathon bombing it doesn't take much to place a large portion of a huge American city under a de-facto state of martial law where armed, black clad forces can go door to door conducting warrantless searches and worse.

Were the possibly of bad public relations not so overwhelming, the government would have brutally put down the mini-rebellion that took place a couple of months ago in southern Nevada led by rancher Cliven Bundy. Bundy, who has become a sort of folk hero to some conservatives along with a horde of protesters gathered to challenge Leviathan over cattle grazing rights. It was tense but eventually the standoff ended with no violence despite having the potential to have become a slaughter. Had the media not drawn so much attention to the situation then Obama and his hatchet man at the Department of Justice Eric Holder would no doubt have had another Waco or Ruby Ridge on their hands which would not have looked good in an election year.

In breaking news The Guardian is now reporting that a second man has been shot by police in Ferguson. This has the potential to get even uglier now. The greatest peril is for some to look at the Ferguson, Missouri situation in racial terms. This not only overlooks the much larger problems but only serves to further condition American citizens to accept an ever more heavily armed and violent generation of police. This is not something that should be allowed to occur in a free country but in reality we surrendered our freedoms to fear after those towers fell nearly thirteen years ago. Now we are reaping the whirlwind.