Law enforcement
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WEEKEND EDITION DECEMBER 19-21, 2014
American
Double Standards
The War at Home Meets the Wars Abroad
by ZOLTAN GROSSMAN
Do you ever get a sense
of déjà vu? When you get a creepy feeling that you’ve been there
before, or experienced something before? On Saturday, December 13, I was
marching in a #BlackLivesMatter march down 4th Avenue in
downtown Olympia, Washington, with about 50 other people in the middle of the
street. It was dark, cars were honking in anger or support, and protesters were
chanting about racist violence, militarization, and the police. That’s when the déjà
vu hit me hard.
But of course, I had heard
it all before. Only seven years ago, a few blocks to the north, antiwar
protesters had blocked the Port of Olympia. They were keeping armored vehicles
from being shipped between Fort Lewis and the killing fields of Iraq. The port
protesters were facing down the police who were protecting the military
equipment, so it could be sent against brown-skinned people in a foreign land.
But now, we were
marching down 4th Ave. because similar armored vehicles were
being brought back from Iraq to be deployed in the “homeland.” They were being
deployed for the oldest and longest war that the United States has ever fought,
against black- and brown-skinned people on American soil. Instead of occupying
Iraq or Afghanistan, they were occupying the streets of American cities. The
militarization of the police is causing the deaths of more and more African
Americans and others, so that every new police killing becomes adéjà vu of
the last one.
We live in a country where not only are
the police being militarized, but an overseas military intervention is
officially termed a “police action.” When soldiers return from Iraq or
Afghanistan, sometimes the only job they can find is in law enforcement or
private security firms, and their military training causes some of them to see
potential enemies everywhere. And because there are fewer jobs available in the
U.S., the same kids who are harassed by cops in their own neighborhoods have
few options other than joining the military to harass other kids abroad.
We shouldn’t be so surprised that the war
is coming home, because it’s always been here. When martial law was declared in
African American neighborhoods of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005,
private Blackwater mercenaries were flown directly from Baghdad to enforce it.
When the U.S. torture chambers in Abu Ghraib Prison were exposed, it was
revealed that one of the torturers had come directly from the prison-industrial
complex in Pennsylvania, where he presumably had learned his tradecraft on
African American and Latino inmates.
The grand jury refusal to indict the killer
of Eric Garner came the same week as the release of a Senate report on the CIA
torture empire that has grown since 9/11. Part of the report focused on
waterboarding, a torture technique (stretching back to counterinsurgency wars
in Native America and the Philippines) in which the victims are nearly drowned
to extract information or confessions. In other words, the purpose of
waterboarding is to prevent a person from breathing, much like the police
chokehold that caused Eric Garner to gasp for air. #ICantBreathe is a statement
with global implications…
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