By
John Fund
April 18, 2014
Regardless of how people feel
about Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy’s standoff with the federal Bureau of Land
Management over his cattle’s grazing rights, a lot of Americans were surprised
to see TV images of an armed-to-the-teeth paramilitary wing of the BLM deployed
around Bundy’s ranch.
They shouldn’t have been.
Dozens of federal agencies now have Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams to
further an expanding definition of their missions. It’s not controversial that
the Secret Service and the Bureau of Prisons have them. But what about the
Department of Agriculture, the Railroad Retirement Board, the Tennessee Valley
Authority, the Office of Personnel Management, the Consumer Product Safety
Commission, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service? All of these have their own
SWAT units and are part of a worrying trend towards the militarization of
federal agencies — not to mention local police forces.
“Law-enforcement agencies
across the U.S., at every level of government, have been blurring the line
between police officer and soldier,”… “The war on drugs and, more recently,
post-9/11 antiterrorism efforts have created a new figure on the U.S. scene:
the warrior cop — armed to the teeth, ready to deal harshly with targeted
wrongdoers, and a growing threat to familiar American liberties.”…… The number
of raids conducted by local police SWAT teams has gone from 3,000 a year in the
1980s to over 50,000 a year today.…To Read More…..
No comments:
Post a Comment