Retired Marine, Col. Pete Martino, brought down the house in a public city meeting in Concord, NH.
"What’s happening here is we’re building a domestic military because it’s unlawful and unconstitutional to use American troops on American soil. So what we’re doing is building a military..... Homeland Security is pre-staging gear, equipment......I saw a picture in the Boston Globe during the Boston Marathon bombing, where there was a State police officer…actually there were two officers, they both had identical helmets, flak jackets, weapons, everything I wore in Iraq, only it was all blue.....we’re building a domestic army and we’re shrinking the military because the government is afraid of it’s own citizens."
"Is everybody blind?!"
"What’s happening here is we’re building a domestic military because it’s unlawful and unconstitutional to use American troops on American soil. So what we’re doing is building a military..... Homeland Security is pre-staging gear, equipment......I saw a picture in the Boston Globe during the Boston Marathon bombing, where there was a State police officer…actually there were two officers, they both had identical helmets, flak jackets, weapons, everything I wore in Iraq, only it was all blue.....we’re building a domestic army and we’re shrinking the military because the government is afraid of it’s own citizens."
"Is everybody blind?!"
You can access a printed transcript here courtesy of theBlaze.com
New Hampshire is a very small state, yet the local chief of police attending the meeting was proposing that the city council authorize more than $250,000 for the purchase of a military-grade urban assault and response vehicle. These BEARCATS (Ballistic Engineered Armed Response Counter Attack Trucks) appear to me more suited to the battlefield than to responding to civilian emergencies. You can see a picture of a similar vehicle in service to the LAPD below:
According to the petition presented by the Concord city council, such a vehicle is required to deal with "domestic terrorist threats". One such organization specifically named as a potential domestic terrorist threat is the so-called "Free State Project" (see the mention of “Free Staters” in Section 1, paragraph B), an organization whose aim is to gather "20,000 liberty lovers" in the state of New Hampshire in order to remake the state government into one more in line with Libertarian views of liberty, freedom and personal responsibility and Constitutionally limited government. I wonder just what it is about a small grass roots political group that so threatens the establishment? I ask you, do these look like wild-eyed fanatics bent on a violent coup?
There's never been any accusation of violence or agenda of forceful overthrow of the government leveled against the group, so why does the local PD need such a vehicle? There are such purchases being made all over the country, both in large urban areas where a plausible reason for the purchase of such vehicles as a response to increasingly violent and sophisticated gangs can be made, to the smallest of towns and counties in rural areas.
If you were to couple this with the reports over the last couple of years of seemingly out-sized purchases of automatic arms and hollow-point ammunition by government agencies that would seem to be unnecessary (the DOE, EPA, SSA and others all have made large purchases of weapons, ammunition and armored vehicles, despite the fact they have no purpose in national defense or police authority) and with Pres. Obama's declaration back in 2008:
“We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we’ve set. We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.”
It's more than just a little concerning. The U.S. military is prevented by the Constitution from acting domestically (excepting, of course, defense of the country against invasion by a foreign force), but there has been no mention of any such limitation, or even of accountability, on this new "Civilian National Security Force". Little or nothing has been reported to Congress or to the public concerning the steps taken towards this goal since this first declaration. If anything has been done, and it appears so, it's been under the cover of darkness and distraction.
"There are instruments so dangerous to the rights of the nation and which place them so totally at the mercy of their governors that those governors, whether legislative or executive, should be restrained from keeping such instruments on foot but in well-defined cases. Such an instrument is a standing army." --Thomas Jefferson
No comments:
Post a Comment