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AS THE WORLD SQUIRMS
Wednesday - January 24, 2007
ARCHIVE
America’s Calculated, Silent ‘WMD’
Against The Iraqi People
Video
“Political language ... is designed to make lies sound truthful
and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure
wind.” ~George Orwell~
  US Senate
Panel Rejects Bush Bid To Send More Troops To Iraq Reuters 1.24.07  Why the 'big
push' sounds horribly familiar Asia Times - Hong Kong 1.24.07 (Excerpt) "The Big
Push" is a phrase that came into the language with another troop surge
that was supposed to bring another war to victory. For months beforehand, the
Big Push was how British cabinet ministers, propagandists, generals, and foot
soldiers talked about the 1916 Battle of the Somme. (It is even the title of
a later book on the subject.)  The Empire
Turns Its Guns on the Citizenry by
Paul Craig Roberts 1.24.07 (Excerpt) In recent
years American police forces have called out SWAT teams 40,000 or more times
annually. Last year did you read in your newspaper or hear on TV news of 110
hostage or terrorist events each day? No. What then were the SWAT teams
doing? They were serving routine warrants to people who posed no danger to
the police or to the public. Occasionally Washington think tanks produce reports that are not
special pleading for donors. One such report is Radley Balko's "Overkill: The Rise of
Paramilitary Police Raids in America" (Cato Institute, 2006). This 100-page report is extremely important and should have been
published as a book. SWAT teams ("special weapons and tactics")
were once rare and used only for very dangerous situations, often involving
hostages held by armed criminals. Today SWAT teams are deployed for routine
police duties. In the U.S. today, 75-80 percent of SWAT deployments are for
warrant service. In a high percentage of the cases, the SWAT teams forcefully
enter the wrong address, resulting in death, injury, and trauma to perfectly
innocent people. Occasionally, highly keyed-up police kill one another in the
confusion caused by their stun grenades. Mr. Balko reports that the use of paramilitary police units
began in Los Angeles in the 1960s. The militarization of local police forces
got a big boost from Attorney General Ed Meese's "war on drugs"
during the Reagan administration. A National Security Decision Directive was
issued that declared drugs to be a threat to U.S. national security. In 1988
Congress ordered the National Guard into the domestic drug war. In 1994 the
Department of Defense issued a memorandum authorizing the transfer of
military equipment and technology to state and local police, and Congress
created a program "to facilitate handing military gear over to civilian
police agencies." Today 17,000 local police forces are equipped with such military
equipment as Blackhawk helicopters, machine guns, grenade launchers,
battering rams, explosives, chemical sprays, body armor, night vision,
rappelling gear, and armored vehicles. Some have tanks. In 1999, the New
York Times reported that a retired police chief in New Haven, Conn., told
the newspaper, "I was offered tanks, bazookas, anything I wanted."
Balko reports that in 1997, for example, police departments received 1.2
million pieces of military equipment. With local police forces now armed beyond the standard of U.S.
heavy infantry, police forces have been retrained "to vaporize, not
Mirandize," to use a phrase from Reagan administration Defense official
Lawrence Korb. This leaves the public at the mercy of brutal actions based on
bad police information from paid informers. SWAT team deployments received a huge boost from the Byrne
Justice Assistance Grant program, which gave states federal money for drug
enforcement. Balko explains that "the states then disbursed the money to
local police departments on the basis of each department's number of drug
arrests." With financial incentives to maximize drug arrests and with idle
SWAT teams due to a paucity of hostage or other dangerous situations, local
police chiefs threw their SWAT teams into drug enforcement. In practice, this
has meant using SWAT teams to serve warrants on drug users. SWAT teams serve warrants by breaking into homes and apartments
at night while people are sleeping, often using stun grenades and other
devices to disorient the occupants. As much of the police's drug information
comes from professional informers known as "snitches" who tip off
police for cash rewards, dropped charges, and reduced sentences, names and
addresses are often pulled out of a hat. Balko provides details for 135
tragic cases of mistaken addresses. SWAT teams are not held accountable for their tragic mistakes
and gratuitous brutality. Police killings got so bad in Albuquerque, N.M.,
for example, that the city hired criminologist Sam Walker to conduct an
investigation of police tactics. Killings by police were "off the charts,"
Walker found, because the SWAT team "had an organizational culture that
led them to escalate situations upward rather then de-escalating." The mindset of militarized SWAT teams is geared to "taking
out" or killing the suspect – thus, the many deaths from
SWAT team utilization. Many innocent people are killed in nighttime SWAT team
entries, because they don't realize that it is the police who have broken
into their homes. They believe they are confronted by dangerous criminals,
and when they try to defend themselves they are shot down by the police. As Lawrence Stratton and I have reported, one of many corrupting
influences on the criminal justice (sic) system is the practice of paying
"snitches" to generate suspects. In 1995 the Boston Globe
profiled people who lived entirely off the fees that they were paid as police
informants. Snitches create suspects by selling a small amount of marijuana
to a person whom they then report to the police as being in possession of
drugs. Balko reports that "an overwhelming number of mistaken raids take
place because police relied on information from confidential
informants." In Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, 87 percent of drug raids
originated in tips from snitches. Many police informers are themselves
drug dealers who avoid arrest and knock off competitors by serving as police
snitches.  Olmert Asks
Israel’s Alleged Rapist President IHT 1.24.07 (Excerpt) HERZLIYA,
Israel: Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Wednesday called on embattled
President Moshe Katsav to resign after the attorney general announced his
intention to press criminal charges, including rape, against him.  Travel to US
falls as Bush shores up Fortress America Toronto Star 1.24.07 A drop of 17 per cent in overseas travellers to the United
States since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has cost the country more than $15
billion (U.S.) in lost taxes and nearly 200,000 jobs, a study showed
yesterday. It also said that, partly as a result of the tightened security
and toughened visa and entry requirements since Sept. 11 , the U.S. was ranked as
the world's most unfriendly to visitors in a survey conducted last year of
travellers from 16 nations. "Our economic security is suffering from a drastic decline
in overseas travellers and we are missing an extraordinary opportunity to
strengthen America's image around the globe," said Stevan Porter,
president of Intercontinental Hotels Group and chair of the association's
Discover America Partnership. "We are in the midst of a travel
crisis." The study released yesterday by the Travel Industry Association
said the
U.S. market share of the $6 trillion worldwide travel market had dropped to
about 6.1 per cent in 2006, from about 7.5 per cent in 2000. Since Sept. 11,
overseas travel to the U.S. has dropped by 17 per cent. The study also said
the drop resulted in 194,000 lost jobs, $25.9 billion in lost payroll and
$15.6 billion in lost taxes to federal, state and local governments. 
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