The Guardian reports that "Britain is preparing for a summer of rage." Has President Obama failed to reinstate Posse Comitatus because he is expecting and preparing for riots in the USA?
french rioters in 2007, flickr image by Nocturnales
I just spoke to a friend who knows someone who is trying to get out of the military because they are training returning troops for riot control to take over US cities and he doesn't want to be a soldier dealing with US citizens. On top of that, these returning Iraq vets are burned out and "fried" with PTSD and exhaustion. And he doesn't want to pick up arms against his own country.
This same source says the military is setting up a separate communication system. In the military, securing or taking out communications is one of the first steps. If you are an invader, you need to bring your own communication system because you have to assume that the existing system will be destroyed or compromised.
This is the kind of talk that gets labeled tinfoil hat, except... riots have already happened in Iceland, Greece, Latvia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Guadeloupe, South Korea. Naomi discussed riots in her recent article, All of Them Must Go - "¡Que se vayan todos!" Klein points out that like the rioters in Argentina, in 2002, the new rioters are challenging the politico-economic system.
Glen Greenwald wrote about the beginnings of what I just heard about back in September last year, in his Salon article, Why is a U.S. Army brigade being assigned to the "Homeland"?
Greenwald cites an Army Times article, about "an on call federal response force."
They'll learn new skills, use some of the ones they acquired in the war zone and more than likely will not be shot at while doing any of it.
They may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control or to deal with potentially horrific scenarios such as massive poisoning and chaos in response to a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive, or CBRNE, attack. . . .
The 1st BCT's soldiers also will learn how to use "the first ever nonlethal package that the Army has fielded," 1st BCT commander Col. Roger Cloutier said, referring to crowd and traffic control equipment and nonlethal weapons designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals without killing them.
"It's a new modular package of nonlethal capabilities that they're fielding. They've been using pieces of it in Iraq, but this is the first time that these modules were consolidated and this package fielded, and because of this mission we're undertaking we were the first to get it."
The package includes equipment to stand up a hasty road block; spike strips for slowing, stopping or controlling traffic; shields and batons; and, beanbag bullets.
"I was the first guy in the brigade to get Tasered," said Cloutier, describing the experience as "your worst muscle cramp ever -- times 10 throughout your whole body". . . .
The brigade will not change its name, but the force will be known for the next year as a CBRNE Consequence Management Response Force, or CCMRF (pronounced "sea-smurf").
Greenwald observed, back in September, that there was no risk of Bush cancelling elections, but, he said, "the deployment is a very dangerous precedent, quite possibly illegal, and a radical abandonment of an important democratic safeguard. As always with first steps of this sort, the danger lies in how the power can be abused in the future."
How long should we wait before it looks bad, that Obama has failed to reverse the end of Posse Comitatus? Or should we expect this administration to keep it in anticipation of the riots we are likely to see? Yes. I think we're going to see riots here. The economic crisis has not it's bottom. More jobs are being lost. More businesses are going under. Even if the level of monthly unemployment figures started to drop, we'd still see, by the end of the year, millions more unemployed.
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