From Local Police to Occupying Army, or LESO: The Greater of Many Evils

Hey h.

I know you hate my guts but who cares. Here's an interesting article on
how the Man is using the Josh Wolfe situation to advance their domestic
control agenda. Have fun! And remember....who loves you even though you
are an asshole...an asshole I have a strange fondness for. Shame on me!

Mike

Libertarian

From Local Police to Occupying Army, or LESO: The Greater of Many Evils

by William Norman Grigg <mailto:WNGrigg@msn.com>

<http://www.ci.charleston.sc.us/dept/zoom.aspx?img=/shared/imgs/0/croppe
d%20m113.jpg>

Well, it sure ain't an RV: This "Peacekeeper" Armored Personnel Carrier
is listed by the Charleston, S.C. Police Department as a "Patrol
Vehicle." <http://www.ci.charleston.sc.us/dept/content.aspx?nid=230>

There are Peacekeepers deployed in US cities, but they're not under UN
command.

They're armored personnel carriers supplied to "local" police agencies
for little or no cost through the Pentagon's Law Enforcement Support
Office (LESO), established in 1995 as part of the Defense Logistics
Agency.

Since that time, the LESO has made huge amounts of military hardware -
from boots to helmets to ammo to helicopters and the "Peacekeeper" APCs
- available to local and state police agencies, often at little or no
cost.

If you're interested in watching the Pentagon's promotional video for
the LESO's campaign to militarize "local" police, go to this page
maintained by the DLA <https://pubweb.drms.dla.mil/cmis/links.htm> . At
the bottom of the links you'll find one leading to "LESO Get With The
Program Video." Follow that link, and - assuming you can withstand the
barrage of really obnoxious whitebread canned pseudo-funk PSL music -
you will have the entire program explained to you.

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/s1600-h/Doraville%2BTank.jpg>
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/s1600-h/Doraville%2BTank.jpg>

Fred Baille, a boileplater-spewing spokesdrone for the DLA's
Distribution Realization Policy Directorate (a suitably Soviet title for
a police-state agency), explains that through the LESO program, "local"
law enforcement agencies can receive "excess" military gear of
practically any description "as if they were a DoD organization."

What this means, in practical and tangible terms, is that your local
police has the same access to military hardware as any branch of the
armed services. In everything but brand name, they're domestic
appendages of the Pentagon.

The "Get With The Program" video
<https://pubweb.drms.dla.mil/cmis/links.htm> demonstrates how easy it
is for police agencies to snag the swag: Simply call up the LESO
website, fill out a form "justifying" the order, and send it in. And
getting "surplus" Pentagon equipment is depicted as a civic-minded thing
to do, since getting the federally subsidized military gear actually
helps keep taxes low.

Not discussed in the video are hidden costs of that subsidy. The
monetary costs are borne by taxpayers nation-wide. But a much larger
price is paid when communities no longer control their own police
agencies.

When local police are supported by local tax funds, they are locally
accountable. When those police are materially and financially supported
by Washington - to any extent - the locus of control and accountability
shifts there. That is the principle recognized in the Supreme Court's
1942 Wickard v. Filburn decision
<http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=317&invol
=111> .

The Bush Regime is trying to expand that principle in the case of Joshua
Wolf <http://www.joshwolf.net/> , a videoblogger imprisoned on federal
contempt charges last fall for refusing to surrender videotape sought by
federal prosecutors.

The Feds claimed that Wolf's video contained footage of an attack by
rioters on a San Francisco Police Department squad car during a July
2005 protest. Wolf maintained that he didn't have the footage sought by
prosecutors - which allegedly showed the squad car being put on fire -
and that under California's shield law, he didn't have to surrender the
tape. The Feds countered <http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/061002pearson/>
that because the SFPD receives federal subsidies (for counter-narcotics
and "homeland security" efforts, among other things), the damaged squad
car is federal property, and so the matter belongs in federal court,
where California's shield law doesn't apply.

That claim has yet to be resolved in the courts, but given that claims
of this sort have been consistently vindicated since, oh, about 1937
<http://www.sparknotes.com/history/american/depression/terms/event_C.17.

, the suspense isn't exactly killing me.

Which leaves us here:

Any police agency that receives so much as a particle of federal aid is
no longer a local police force. It is, in principle, a federal army of
occupation.

Yes, most policemen (including those seen in LESO's promotional video)
are decent and honorable people who honestly believe that they are
serving and protecting their communities. But the people who fund and
control them are neither decent, nor honorable, and at a time of their
choosing they can execute Order 66
<http://www.starwars.com/databank/updates/news20050705.html> (if you'll
pardon the allusion) and turn that army against us.

For decades, since the Kennedy administration unveiled its Freedom From
War <http://dosfan.lib.uic.edu/ERC/arms/freedom_war.html> program for
UN-administered "general and complete disarmament," many observers have
wondered when the blue helmets of the UN "Peace Force" would be
dispatched to disarm Americans and put down patriotic resistance. It's
not impossible that such a scenario could eventually be played out,
however unlikely it is at present.

People who focus on the UN as the source of the immediate threat,
however, are preoccupied with the wrong threat vector
<http://www.javvin.com/networksecurity/ThreatVector.html> .

January 31, 2007

William Norman Grigg [send him mail <mailto:WNGrigg@msn.com> ] writes
the Pro Libertate blog <http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com/> .

Copyright (c) 2007 William Norman Grigg

William Norman Grigg Archives
<http://www.lewrockwell.com/grigg/grigg-arch.html>

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