Wehrwolfen
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- May 22, 2012
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By Robert Small
February 23, 2013
"We have cleared away the rubble of crisis," President Obama reported in his State of the Union address, "and we can say with renewed confidence that the State of our Union is stronger." He cited troops coming home after a decade of "grinding war," six million jobs created "after years of grueling recession," American car purchases up, foreign oil purchases down, a healing housing market, a rebounding stock market, corporate profits that "have skyrocketed to all-time highs," Republicans and Democrats working together "to reduce the deficit by more than $2.5 trillion," "tens of thousands" of American jobs created by green energy, and a boom in natural gas production that's lowering our energy bills.
If things are so peachy, I have a question for the president. What's with the Black Hawk helicopters and urban warfare drills?
The Army took over an empty high school in southeast Houston without warning last month in a Department of Defense drill. Terrified residents mistook blank fire for live rounds. At a City Council meeting the next day, Mayor Annise Parker decried "a shocking lack of sensitivity to community concerns" that caught even some in the police department by surprise. About the same time council members were meeting in Houston, "federal law enforcement" agents were rappelling down ropes from military helicopters hovering over the Capitol in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
Days earlier in Miami, one local news station reported that blanks fired from Black Hawks soaring low over downtown were "pinging off the high rises[,]" and another reported troops "rappelling from the military choppers onto the Metrorail station platform." The official explanation: "The training is designed to ensure that military personnel are able to operate in urban areas and to focus on preparations for overseas deployment. It also serves as a mandatory training certification." If true, why so many exercises now, when more troops are scheduled to come home than be deployed? And why are so many of them, like one in Los Angeles last January, team exercises with local law enforcement? A reader claiming to be a former Marine commented on the CBS Los Angeles news website that he was an infantryman for 20 years and never trained in any city or town with civilians present. Others are skeptical as well.
John Wayne Tucker, blogging at Home - theboldpursuit.com, has posted links to local reports of similar exercises that have taken place in at least 14 cities, most of them over the last twelve months. One in his hometown of St. Louis last summer involved tanks rolling through neighborhoods in what local news reported was a military "driver's ed of sorts." Tucker calls for citizens to demand an explanation from their representatives.
While we're at it, can we get an explanation that makes sense for the nearly 2 billion rounds of ammunition the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies have been purchasing? The AP has reported that it's nothing more sinister than bulk buying to get a discount; however, Investor Business Daily's Andrew Malcolm wrote that experts have calculated that it's enough ammo to arm DHS "for a 24-year Iraq war," which, he remarked, "is especially strange given Obama's double-barreled emphasis in his inaugural address on the approaching end in Afghanistan 'of a decade of war.'"
After reading Malcolm's article on air last Friday, radio host Mark Levin dismissed internet chatter about the DHS preparing for domestic insurrection. He thinks it more likely that the government's preparing for a catastrophe of their own making: "the collapse of our financial system, the collapse of our society, and the potential for widespread violence" in the streets that accompanies such crises.
[Excerpt]
Read more:
Articles: Clearing Away the Rubble...with Black Hawks, Tanks, and Loads of Ammo
February 23, 2013
"We have cleared away the rubble of crisis," President Obama reported in his State of the Union address, "and we can say with renewed confidence that the State of our Union is stronger." He cited troops coming home after a decade of "grinding war," six million jobs created "after years of grueling recession," American car purchases up, foreign oil purchases down, a healing housing market, a rebounding stock market, corporate profits that "have skyrocketed to all-time highs," Republicans and Democrats working together "to reduce the deficit by more than $2.5 trillion," "tens of thousands" of American jobs created by green energy, and a boom in natural gas production that's lowering our energy bills.
If things are so peachy, I have a question for the president. What's with the Black Hawk helicopters and urban warfare drills?
The Army took over an empty high school in southeast Houston without warning last month in a Department of Defense drill. Terrified residents mistook blank fire for live rounds. At a City Council meeting the next day, Mayor Annise Parker decried "a shocking lack of sensitivity to community concerns" that caught even some in the police department by surprise. About the same time council members were meeting in Houston, "federal law enforcement" agents were rappelling down ropes from military helicopters hovering over the Capitol in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
Days earlier in Miami, one local news station reported that blanks fired from Black Hawks soaring low over downtown were "pinging off the high rises[,]" and another reported troops "rappelling from the military choppers onto the Metrorail station platform." The official explanation: "The training is designed to ensure that military personnel are able to operate in urban areas and to focus on preparations for overseas deployment. It also serves as a mandatory training certification." If true, why so many exercises now, when more troops are scheduled to come home than be deployed? And why are so many of them, like one in Los Angeles last January, team exercises with local law enforcement? A reader claiming to be a former Marine commented on the CBS Los Angeles news website that he was an infantryman for 20 years and never trained in any city or town with civilians present. Others are skeptical as well.
John Wayne Tucker, blogging at Home - theboldpursuit.com, has posted links to local reports of similar exercises that have taken place in at least 14 cities, most of them over the last twelve months. One in his hometown of St. Louis last summer involved tanks rolling through neighborhoods in what local news reported was a military "driver's ed of sorts." Tucker calls for citizens to demand an explanation from their representatives.
While we're at it, can we get an explanation that makes sense for the nearly 2 billion rounds of ammunition the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies have been purchasing? The AP has reported that it's nothing more sinister than bulk buying to get a discount; however, Investor Business Daily's Andrew Malcolm wrote that experts have calculated that it's enough ammo to arm DHS "for a 24-year Iraq war," which, he remarked, "is especially strange given Obama's double-barreled emphasis in his inaugural address on the approaching end in Afghanistan 'of a decade of war.'"
After reading Malcolm's article on air last Friday, radio host Mark Levin dismissed internet chatter about the DHS preparing for domestic insurrection. He thinks it more likely that the government's preparing for a catastrophe of their own making: "the collapse of our financial system, the collapse of our society, and the potential for widespread violence" in the streets that accompanies such crises.
[Excerpt]
Read more:
Articles: Clearing Away the Rubble...with Black Hawks, Tanks, and Loads of Ammo
