Police-Military Action After Boston Marathon Bombing Remains Very Troubling

Republished from Stanton McCandlish:

“A clearer discussion needs to happen about the 15 April 2013 “martial law”-style Watertown search, warrantless and house-by-house, for the surviving suspect after the Boston Marathon bombing. Without any more “the authorities colluded with the terrorists!” conspiracy theories, please.

At least one early source, the UK’s ‘Daily Mail’, was not reliable, and wrote with what seems to be intentional alarmist exaggeration that people in Boston’s Watertown borough had largely been ordered out of their homes unwillingly and at gunpoint, when in fact it turns out that many say they willingly cooperated.

There still really are some serious issues here, both an overstepping of governmental authority, and a stark, obvious warning that more ominous plans may already be laid down.

The short version is that, in what amounts to a de facto state of local martial law, militarized police with genuine military backing, armed with machine guns and armored troop transports, went from house to house and “asked” families to get out of their homes so that they could be searched for the remaining bomber suspect (a wounded teenager who wasn’t actually in that area; i.e. there was no probable cause for a warrant, must less an emergency search). Some have surmised that the entire neighborhood was evacuated as if there were an encroaching fire or flood – a public emergency – but I cannot find any reliable sources that support this, and the eyewitness reports and footage show individual homeowners and families being escorted out of their houses while each was searched in turn. Even if they had been evacuated en masse for safety reasons, that would raise even more of a Fourth Amendment and abuse of police power problem than individually getting alleged permission to search on a per-dwelling basis.

Regardless, there wasn’t, unsurprisingly, much resistance reported to this “shock and awe” show, but not everyone is exactly convinced that the “volunteered permission” to search given by some families, who were first terrorized by a bombing nearby then frightened into submission by police-soldiers in force on their doorsteps, was exactly “voluntary”. Coerced permission is invalid by definition (this is why armed robbery and rape are not somehow mistaken for consensual when victims don’t risk their lives to fight back). Some who were there report being more enraged and eager to cooperate than afraid, but this still raises the same concern: Taking advantage of any extreme state of mass psychology to engage in police-state actions for expediency and swift retribution of the state is essentially the same, whatever that particular state is. Many totalitarian regimes have gained initial power with more voices chanting support behind them, and louder, than those in opposition or warning. (Note: This isn’t about trying to tell Watertown residents what their subjective experience was; this is about everyone still trying to figure out just what the hell all of our expeirence of this is and what it means.)

The Boston “super-SWAT” phalanx operation also involved – according to multiple, mainstream, US-based sources – the National Guard (a US-state-level, part-time branch of the military, labelled a militia but administrated by the US Army and US Air Force, and equipped as such), making it demonstrably a military not just militaristic move. These forces were deployed with such rapidity, order, and cooperation that the action is being likened to a “trial balloon” or “beta test” of broader martial law and other police-state tactics, for which there must be a classified “playbook”. This is not at all far-fetched. The hundreds-of-pages-long USA-PATRIOT Act, sprawling, intricate and sweeping legislation granting police and spy agencies unprecedented new powers (which they’ve subsequently abused, as predicted, with almost no oversight or restraints), had to have taken several years to write, yet was delivered, ready-made to the US Congress by the FBI and Department of Justice only a few weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, and passed in just two days. That’s just one example of what we’re talking about here.

Was this a “psyop”, a form of propagandistic psychological training not just for troops to get used to treating citizens like livestock, but for citizens themselves to get used to being treated like obedient herd animals with no rights and no reason to question or resist? This level of suspicion is not a conspiracy theory, and does not depend upon any assumption of government collusion with or permitting of terrorism (such conspiracy theories do exist, but I haven’t seen anything convincing in them). Rather, it is simple observation of the cynical, authoritarian pattern of exploitation of such terrorism attacks and the public fear generated thereby, to gain more power by police and intelligence agencies. This has been going on in the US for a very long time (arguably since at least the Wilson administration and the formation of the FBI). Older Europeans will certainly recognize this pattern as something they’ve seen first hand and survived before, starting in the 1930s.”

1 Comment Police-Military Action After Boston Marathon Bombing Remains Very Troubling

  1. AvatarMatthew Slater

    Very good points here, but I think we need to stop distancing ourself from so called conspiracy theories and stand behind the facts as we understood them.

    Here are some facts such as I have gleaned.
    -The first bomb was a planned by the authorities and did no real damage, but we did get those super-shocking photos of the double amputee and fake blood. The second bomb was a real bomb.
    -The suspects went back to their lives and behaved normally for 2 days before being involved in a shoot out.
    -The bombing suspects had family ties to the CIA.
    -The authorities refuse to answer questions about drills running on the day, or to acknowledge any of the crowd-source detective work, despite rhetoric to the contrary.
    -CNN interviewed the same woman at the scene of 2 different horror stories, pointing to a disturbing trend of ‘staging’ news reports

    These facts don’t suggest to me “the authorities colluded with the terrorists!”, but rather “the terrorists are deeply embedded in the authorities – again, and the media is at best useless, at worse, complicit”. Mainstream media is adding to the confusion by throwing up lots of dust, following only certain leads and ignoring what the rest of the world is saying. For example in this matter of house-to-house searches, the serious constitutional issues were not raised, but instead it was presented as model citizens cooperating with a heroic police force.

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