Police State: US Military Plans to Crush Dissident Political Groups, Target Leaders with Sniper Fire

Police State: US Military Plans to Crush Dissident Political Groups, Target Leaders with Sniper Fire

By Thomas Gaist

Global Research, August 31, 2014

World Socialist Web Site 30 August 2014

Links tweeted by WikiLeaks this week called attention to the development of crowd control doctrines by the US military, the most recent of which are codified in a US Army Techniques document dated April 2014, titled "Civil Disturbances." Main concepts elaborated in the document include crowd dynamics, behavior theories, crowd types, and a "Graduated Response Matrix."

The document points to various dissident political groups as main targets of the Army's crowd control planning. "Examples of well-organized groups are anarchists, antiglobalization groups, and anti free enterprise groups," the US Army document states.

The paper further cites demonstrations coordinated by labor groups, specifically citing the 2011 protests at the Wisconsin capitol. "Labor unions played a large role in the 2011 Wisconsin protests that included passing on information and transporting participants," the document states.

Special attention is given to "organized protests," which are said to have more growth potential than spontaneous protests as result of their "centralized planning" and use of "modern technologies that allow for rapid information dissemination."

Techniques outlined in the document include the use non-lethal weapons, "pain compliance" measures, lethal overwatch teams (snipers), and deployment of aircraft overhead (said to have a "psychological effect").

The use of military working dog (MWD) teams is highlighted as an especially effective "intimidation measure." "The presence of the MWD may produce a profound psychological effect on the crowd," the document states.

The document calls for deployment of "overwatch" sniper teams to intimidate crowds and pick off suspected leaders and organizers. Such use of snipers to terrorize demonstrators, recently on display in Ferguson, Missouri, where protests against the killing of Michael Brown were subject to a massive crackdown by militarized police forces, is part of the Army's integrated Graduated Response Matrix (GRM). The GRM provides for numerous levels of escalating psychological and physical pressure against a targeted crowd, including:

* Exploit the psychological effect of shows of force.

* Escalate the Military Information Support Operations (MISO) message via loudspeakers and handbills- MISO is a more recently adopted military term for psychological operations (PSYOPS).

* Demonstrate sniper precision strike capability.

* Use riot control ammunition: tear gas, pepper spray, smoke bombs, stun grenades, rubber munitions, acoustic weapons, electro-muscular disruption weapons.

* Move through the crowd using riot control formations and movement techniques.

* Target leaders and "troublemakers" with sniper fire.

* Escalate from single shot small caliber fire to automatic large caliber.

* Close air support and indirect fire (artillery, mortars).

While stating that "coercion dispersal" of crowds may become necessary, the document notes that "negotiated management of crowds … is the preferred method especially if the demonstration or protest leaders are available and willing to participate," and advises commanders to adhere to the "goldilocks principle," saying crowd control activities should be "neither too hard nor too soft."

The document also calls for the use of "high powered cameras mounted on towers and aerial vehicles" to create video recordings of both the crowd and the soldiers engaged in crowd control operations.

Ominously, the document outlines conditions under which the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which prohibits the use of the US military for police actions on American soil, will not apply. Under a range of loosely defined "exceptional" conditions, the military can conduct unrestrained operations within the United States, the document notes.

In "emergency extraordinary circumstances," including vaguely defined contingencies such as "unlawful obstruction or rebellion against the authority of the United States," US military commanders are empowered to carry out, without requiring any form of civilian authorization, "activities that are necessary to quell large-scale, unexpected civil disturbances," the document states.

Such sophisticated crowd control doctrines are an expression of the far advanced preparations by the US ruling elite, dating back decades, to establish martial law and transition to a police state dictatorship.

Congressional hearings in May of 1987 on the Iran-Contra scandal exposed plans, codenamed Operation Rex '84, to suspend the US Constitution, transfer power to a shadow dictatorship consisting of agents of the military and intelligence apparatus, and conduct mass roundups of hundreds of thousands of political opponents of the American state.

In the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the George W. Bush administration implemented "continuity of government" (COG) procedures virtually identical to those laid out by Operation Rex, establishing a secret network of anonymous officials working from "undisclosed secure locations." Without any consultation with or involvement of the legislative and judicial branches, between 75 and 150 members of the executive branch were ensconced in military bunkers and legal documents were drawn up to empower these officials with authoritarian powers.

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'In the spring, months before Michael Brown was shot and Ferguson erupted in reaction, whoever writes New York City Police Commissioner William J. Bratton's blog for him posted, "In my long police career I have often drawn inspiration from a great hero of mine, Sir Robert Peel. Peel founded the London Metropolitan Police in 1829." The post listed the nine "Peelian Principles" attributed (probably spuriously) to the founder of modern policing and formulated to combat crime in a rapidly modernizing city. The principles are remarkable both for the high ideals to which they aspire, and the minimal resemblance they bear to the actual forces over which Bratton and his counterparts around the United States actually preside.'

Read more: Are Police More Damned Trouble Than They're Worth? Modern police forces have become little more than a new set of predators from which the public needs protection.

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August 28, 2014

Warrior Cops

The Roots of Police Militarization

by KEVIN CARSON

The police rampage in Ferguson, Missouri has increased public awareness of police militarization and drawn well-deserved attention to writers like Radley Balko who've documented the proliferation of military equipment and culture in local police forces over the past decade.

It's certainly true that the post-9/11 security state and the Global War on Terror have flooded police forces with surplus military equipment, increased the prevalence of military cross-training (including "counter-terrorism" training by Israeli military personnel encouraging American police forces to view their communities in much the same way Israeli security forces view the Palestinians in Gaza).

But the roots of police militarization go back way further than 9/11 – all the way back to the aftermath of insurrections by the black populations of major American cities in the 1960s and the American political elite's desire to ensure that nothing like that ever happened again.

US presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon began creating an institutional framework to ensure that any such disorder in the future would be dealt with differently. This process culminated in DOD Civil Disturbance Plan 55-2, aka "Garden Plot," which involved domestic surveillance by the military, contingency plans for military cooperation with local police in suppressing local disorders, plans for mass preventive detention and joint exercises of police and the regular military. Frank Morales wrote in Cover Action Quarterly ("U.S. Military Civil Disturbance Planning: The War at Home," Spring-Summer 2000):

"At first, the Garden Plot exercises focused primarily on racial conflict. But beginning in 1970, the scenarios took a different twist. The joint teams, made up of cops, soldiers and spies, began practicing battle with large groups of protesters. California, under the leadership of Ronald Reagan, was among the most enthusiastic participants in Garden Plot war games. … Garden plot [subsequently] evolved into a series of annual training exercises based on contingency plans to undercut riots and demonstrations, ultimately developed for every major city in the United States. Participants in the exercises included key officials from all law enforcement agencies in the nation, as well as the National Guard, the military, and representatives of the intelligence community."

It was against this background that then-governor Reagan introduced the first SWAT teams in California.

When Reagan became president, he appointed Louis O. Giuffrida, who as head of the

California Guard had enthusiastically participated in Garden Plot exercises under Reagan's govenorship, to head the Federal Emergency Management Agency. In that role Giuffrida worked with Oliver North to draw up plans for martial law in the event of a "national emergency." They worked together on the Readiness Exercises 1983 and 1984 (Rex-83 and Rex-84), which included mass detention of suspected "terrorist subversives" under the emergency provisions of Garden Plot.

The hypothetical civil disturbance/insurrection scenario these emergency exercises were supposed to be coping with was (ahem) a series of massive antiwar demonstrations in response to a U.S. military invasion of Central America. "North … helped draw up a controversial plan to suspend the Constitution in the event of a national crisis, such as nuclear war, violent and widespread internal dissent or national opposition to a U.S. military invasion abroad (Alfonso Chardy, "Reagan Aides and the 'Secret' Government," Miami Herald, July 5, 1987).

The militarization of local polic, and the encouragement of a police culture that viewed local communities (especially people of color in minority neighborhoods) as an occupied enemy populations, got further impetus from the War on Drugs, which was greatly intensified under the Reagan administration. By 1999 - well before the Global War on Terror - the phenomenon had progressed to the point that Diane Cecilia Weber wrote a Cato Institute paper titled "Warrior Cops: The Ominous Growth of Paramilitarism in American Police Departments" (Briefing Paper No. 50).

Since 9/11, the problem has grown beyond Weber's imagining. After Katrina the (largely black) flooded out portions of New Orleans got a demonstration of the same police hostility and aggression we're witnessing today in Ferguson. It's a safe guess that this is now the standard treatment to expect from local police in a community experiencing an "emergency" or (manufactured) "disturbance" of any kind.

Ultimately, what it boils down to is the government views its own people - particularly those of color - as the enemy. The question is how long we will tolerate it.

Kevin Carson is a senior fellow of the Center for a Stateless Society (c4ss.org) and holds the Center's Karl Hess Chair in Social Theory.

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Published on 29 Aug 2014

Underground World News 2014 Close to 200 state and local police departments in the United States have been suspended for losing military-level equipment transferred to them by the Pentagon, a new investigation found.

According to the media outlet Fusion, its independent investigation into the Pentagon's "1033 program," which equips state and local police departments across the US with excess military equipment, turned up an alarming trend: Not only did many law enforcement agencies fail to comply with the program's guidelines, they routinely lost dangerous weaponry.

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