by
William Norman Grigg

Recently by William Norman Grigg: The
Triumph of the Reich-Publican Party

When he gazes
into the mirror, Lubbock County Judge Tom Head apparently sees the
Lone Star State’s equivalent of the Roman military hero Horatius,
or perhaps Wang Weilin, the “Tank Man” of Tiananmen Square.

During
a recent interview with the local Fox affiliate, Judge Head
was asked to explain his support for a proposed county tax increase.
The money would be spent to hire additional deputies and to provide
pay increases for the District Attorney and his staff – which is
to say that it would help fortify the county government’s mechanism
of regimentation and wealth extraction. In what may have been a
moment of manic improvisation, Head insisted that the tax increase
would be necessary in order to fortify the county in the event Barack
Obama deployed UN peacekeepers to subdue Lubbock County.

“He’s
going to try to hand over the sovereignty of the United States to
the UN,” Head declared. When that happens, predicted the judge,
we will witness “civil unrest, civil disobedience, civil war
maybe. And we’re not just talking a few riots here and demonstrations,
we’re talking Lexington, Concord, take up arms and get rid of the
guy.”

When faced
with growing rebellion, Obama “will send in UN troops,”
Head predicted. But fear not, beleaguered residents of Lubbock County,
for Judge Head was rendered from the same mold used to produce the
Alamo’s intrepid defenders. So it will be that when
Obama swears by the nine gods and names his trysting day, Head
will be there to hold the bridge against the heathen hordes.

“I don’t
want ‘em in Lubbock County, so I’m going to stand in front of their
armored personnel carrier and say ‘you’re not coming in here!’”
Head told an interviewer who was visibly laboring to contain his
mirth. “And the sheriff, I’ve already asked him. I said, `You
gonna back me?’ and he said, `Yeah, I’ll back you.’ Well, I don’t
want a bunch of rookies back there. I want trained, equipped, seasoned
veteran officers to back me.”

Although the
prospect of a second Obama term is pregnant with potential horrors,
we can round down to zero the likelihood that a re-enthroned Barack
Obama would dispatch foreign shock troops in blue helmets to pacify
Lubbock County. He wouldn’t have to.

During the
Cold War, critics of open trade with Soviet Bloc countries would
often repeat the truism “Communism will be built with non-Communist
hands.” There is a sense in which that expression applies to
the Homeland Security State that was inherited by Barack Obama.
Regarding the infrastructure of domestic tyranny, “Law and
Order” conservatives like Tom Head have every right to tell
Obama, “You didn’t build that.”

Head, who has
been Lubbock County’s top elected official since 1999, is a
former police officer and – more significantly – a former SWAT
operator. This means that he is a product of the same
system over which Barack Obama now presides. Less than a year before
promising to sacrifice his body to prevent federal APCs from violating
the sovereign soil of Lubbock County, Head eagerly
welcomed a $250,000 Homeland Security grant to purchase a new
APC for the county’s SWAT team.

Conservatives
haunted by the prospect of a UN-led invasion and occupation of the
United States should focus their concerns on their local police
department, rather than the tombstone-shaped UN Headquarters Building
in New York City. Rather than indulging in fantasies involving blue
helmeted foreign troops, they should fasten their attention on the
activities of their local SWAT team – which is the local affiliate
of a federal apparatus of repression that grew out of two related
UN initiatives.

In 1961, the
U.S. State Department published a document entitled “Freedom from
War: The United States Program for General and Complete Disarmament
in a Peaceful World” (also known as Document 7277). In the same
year, the UN promulgated its Single
Convention on Narcotic Drugs, thereby creating the framework
for the global drug prohibition crusade.

Although obscure
and largely ignored, those two documents – and the policies that
sprang from them – are directly implicated in the growth and expansion
of America’s police state.

In addition
to serving as the framework for international arms control policy,
“Freedom from War” provided the institutional framework
for the militarization of domestic law enforcement. The Single Convention
on narcotics supplied the “legal” authority for the war
on drugs – thereby providing an infinitely self-sustaining conflict
for those troops to fight.

The “Freedom
from War” proposal abdumbrated a three-stage program through
which the UN would be “progressively strengthened in order
to improve its capacity to assure international security and the
peaceful settlement of disputes.” In this arrangement, UN member
states would provide military assets and personnel to a “peace
force” controlled by the Security Council. (In practical terms
this role is played by the NATO alliance, a regional subsidiary
of the UN, supplemented by whatever governments the U.S. can bribe
or threaten into joining a “coalition of the willing”).

“Freedom
from War” also dictates that each national government would
maintain a centralized, militarized “internal security force”
that would maintain domestic order on behalf of the incumbent political
elite.

What would
an “internal security force” look like? Daryl Gates answered
that question when he
created the first SWAT team in 1968. Although marketed as a
special-purpose civilian unit to be employed in hostage situations,
armed robberies, and in similar circumstances, SWAT was designed
to deal with “crowd control and civil unrest,” according
to police historian (and former LAPD Officer) Glynn Martin. That
is to say that SWAT teams were always intended to intimidate the
public, rather than protect it.

Shortly after
the LAPD introduced the SWAT concept, Congress – with the eager
support of the Nixon administration – enacted the Comprehensive
Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act. That measure, which was
essentially a declaration of war on unauthorized drug use, noted
that the U.S. “is a party to the Single Convention on Narcotic
Drugs … and other conventions designed to establish effective control
over international and domestic traffic in controlled substances.”

Once the legislative
support was in place, the Feds lost no time in militarizing narcotics
enforcement. In January 1972, Richard
Nixon created the Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement (ODALE) by
executive order. ODALE pooled personnel and resources from more
than a half-dozen federal agencies – including the Internal Revenue
Service, the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (a precursor
to the DEA) and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms – and
given a mandate to “bypass normal channels” in order to
crack down on drug possession and trafficking.

The agency
drew up a target list of thirty cities and created multi-jurisdictional
task forces with state and local police. The task forces were given
huge sums of money to hire informants and conduct “controlled
buys” of narcotics, and given considerable latitude to engage
in wiretapping and other domestic espionage. Local SWAT teams were
deployed to serve “no-knock” search warrants.

Freed from
the fetters of due process, ODALE went on a rampage that foreshadowed
the paramilitary abuses that have now become commonplace. In his
book Agency
of Fear, Edward J. Epstein recounts
an ODALE no-knock raid on the Collinsville, Illinois home of
Herbert Giglotto.

Sometime around
midnight, Giglotto and his wife heard footsteps on the stairs outside
their bedroom.

“I got
out of bed; I took three steps, looked down the hall and I [saw]
men running up the hall dressed like hippies with pistols, yelling
and screeching,” Giglotto recounted. “I turned to my wife.
`God, honey, we’re dead.’”

Several of
the invaders seized Giglotto, threw him face-down on his bed, and
tied his hands behind his back.

“Who is
that bitch lying there?” one of them screamed at Giglotto,
referring to his terrified wife. Another pressed a loaded gun to
Giglotto’s head and told him, “You’re going to die unless you
tell us where the stuff is.” After terrorizing the couple and
ransacking their home, the intruders realized that they had the
wrong address – and left without apology.

“On the
same evening in Collinsville, another group of raiders from ODALE
kicked in the door of the home of Donald and Virginia Askew, on
the north side of town,” narrates Epstein. Virginia, who was
crippled from a back injury, fainted. Armed assailants prevented
her husband from coming to her aid, and threatened to murder their
sixteen-year-old son, Michael, when he tried to phone for help.

During the
same Easter week blitzkrieg, the counter-narcotics gestapo raided
a farmhouse in Edwardsville, Illinois, and imprisoned John Meiners
for seventy-seven hours.

“I was
asleep about three A.M. when the agents rushed in and pushed me
against the wall,” Meiners related. While one of the thugs
held a gun to Meiners’ head, the others smashed walls, shattered
windows, and helped themselves to valuables. The victim was then
taken to a local police station and held for three days before being
released without being charged with a crime.

None of the
officials or operatives responsible for ODALE’s Kristallnacht-style
rampage was ever punished. The transparent purpose of ODALE was
to generate a large number of election year arrests in support of
Nixon’s re-election effort through what Epstein called “the
continued organization of fear by the White House.” Once its
political purpose had been served, the agency was quietly disbanded
in June 1973. But during its 18-month existence, ODALE created the
template used today by practically every counter-narcotics task
force in the country.

During the
administration of Ronald Reagan – who, as we have recently learned,
was
an FBI asset for most of his adult life – the war on drugs was
dramatically escalated. The Posse Comitatus statute was perforated
with exceptions permitting the Pentagon – working through various
Joint Task Forces — to provide training and equipment to SWAT teams
and to carry out a limited number of domestic counter-narcotics
operations.

In fact, any
law enforcement mission could become a fully militarized operation
if it could be packaged as counter-narcotics initiative. The February
1993 federal assault on Waco’s Branch Davidian sect was
militarized after Texas Governor Ann Richards – citing a bogus
claim that the Davidians were operating a meth lab – claimed that
the investigation involved a “drug nexus.” This permitted
the ATF to receive training and material assistance from the Army’s
Joint Task Force Six in planning and carrying out its attack on
what was characterized as “a dangerous extremist organization.”

Three years
after her “Justice” Department had annihilated scores
of people at Waco, Attorney General Janet Reno inaugurated the Pentagon’s
Law Enforcement Support Organization (LESO), through which police
departments can have access to military hardware of any description
on the assumption that each police department is “a DoD organization.”
What this means, of course, is that if your “local” police
is part of the LESO framework, it is – in everything but name –
an appendage of the Pentagon.

This is precisely
the arrangement called for in the “Freedom from War” proposal.

By the end
of the 1990s, U.S. military participation in UN-mandated “peacekeeping”
and “peace enforcement” missions had become commonplace.
While U.S. military personnel were being deployed as police overseas,
American police departments were increasingly behaving like occupying
armies.

One suitable
example is provided by the Fresno, California Police Department’s
Violent Crime Suppression Unit (VCSU). Beginning in 1994, the VCSU
– which described itself as the department’s “special forces”
branch – conducted street patrols in the city’s impoverished suburbs.
Officers assigned to the unit wore military garb and toted military-grade,
fully automatic weapons. The unit was backed with two helicopters
equipped with infrared sensors, and a Pentagon-provided Armored
Personnel Carrier.

Rather than
investigating crimes and arresting suspects, the VCSU conducted
what the military calls “contact patrols” – that is, they
would descend on a targeted neighborhood “like a wolf pack”
(to use the department’s description) and see what trouble they
could stir up.

“`Contacts’
generally involve swooping onto street corners, forcing pedestrians
to the ground, searching them, running warrant checks, taking photos,
and entering all the new `intelligence’ into a state database from
computer terminals in each patrol car,” recalled crime reporter
Christian Parenti in his book Lockdown
America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis. Every
neighborhood was considered a “war zone,” and all of the
inhabitants therein were treated as “enemy combatants.”

“If you’re
21, male, living in one of these neighborhoods, and you’re not in
our computer, then there’s definitely something wrong,” insisted
VCSU officer Paul Boyer. From that perspective, your absence from
the database wouldn’t reflect the fact that you’re an innocent person,
but rather that you’re a particularly devious “enemy combatant”
who had eluded detection.

The VCSU would
often take part in joint paramilitary operations with the FBI, DEA,
and the San Francisco Police Department. Those raids were not conducted
pursuant to warrants or probable cause regarding specific crimes,
but rather to intimidate suspected gang members.

Each of them
was a “Shock and Awe”-style display of military superiority
by the local occupation authority.

“I feel
bad for the innocent women and children that were here,” stated
SFPD narcotics lieutenant Kitt Crenshaw after a nighttime military
raid terrorized an apartment complex and netted a minuscule amount
of marijuana, “but in a way they do bear some responsibility
for harboring drug dealers.”

The police
agencies involved in these raids referred to their approach as “clear
and hold” – a phrase that would later be employed by U.S. military
personnel conducting occupation missions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and
elsewhere. Remember: This was taking place in the United States
of America before the 9/11 attacks, the creation of the Department
of Homeland Security.

A
propaganda video produced by the Kansas City Police Department
unwittingly illustrates just how thoroughly militarized domestic
law enforcement has become.

The clip begins
with an on-screen narration by what appears to be a heavily tranquilized
female officer, who soothingly explains that when tactical teams
– that is, military units in black body armor – serve search warrants,
the element of surprise is important “for the safety of everyone.”
This does prove traumatic “not only for occupants of the house,
but for neighbors as well,” she continues. This is why post-raid
neighborhood outreach by the stormtroopers is now standard procedure.

“Anytime
we’re going to kick in a house like this, we’ve got kids in the
neighborhood … and it kind of resembles a military operation,”
explains Sgt. Chip Huth, displaying his singular command of the
obvious. What he’s describing is a military operation, an
example of what the Pentagon calls “operations other than war.”

According to
Sgt. Huth, “We have to establish objective peace before we
can move on to any community-building peace.” This is the language
of military occupation: Pacify a targeted neighborhood, then try
to win the “hearts and minds” of residents.

Conservatives
of Tom Head’s vintage probably remember the mid-1980s ABC miniseries
Amerika, which depicted a prostrate United States after being
conquered and occupied by the Soviet Union. Internal order was maintained
by black-clad UN “peacekeepers” whose attire – and conduct
– make them indistinguishable from the shock troops that are frequently
deployed by most “local” police departments today.

Judge Head’s
cynical, self-dramatizing promise to hold the bridge against a UN
invasion of Lubbock County offers an insipid, but unmistakable,
echo to Garet
Garrett’s famous lament:

“There
are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution
that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong
direction. The revolution is behind them.”

September
6, 2012

William
Norman Grigg [send him mail]
publishes the Pro
Libertate blog and hosts the Pro
Libertate radio program.

Copyright
© 2012 William Norman Grigg

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