“Columbia police are preparing for the big crowds expected after the Georgia-South Carolina football game Saturday night,” WISTV reports. “Officials say campus police, Richland County sheriff’s deputies, the South Carolina Highway Patrol and Fort Jackson’s military police will help with crowd control after the game.”
In addition to the military, officialdom in Columbia plan to establish Fourth Amendment busting DUI checkpoints, barricades, and an observation tower “to keep the crowd under control” and “ensure order.”
As Brandon Tuberville writes for Activist Post, the effort is “nothing more than a conditioning exercise designed to acclimate the American people to the sight of US Military troops acting as police and to see it as an ordinary event.”
In June, Capt. William Geddes of the U.S. Army Reserve in Missouri admitted that it is against federal law for [soldiers] to do police patrols.“Perhaps someone should remind Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, General Raymond T. Odierno that it is illegal for troops to conduct law enforcement domestically,” Paul Joseph Watson wrote on June 27. In a recent Foreign Affairs piece, a publication of the Council on Foreign Relations, Odierno suggested that the army be ‘transitioned’ into a more ‘flexible force’ by deploying in situations normally reserved for domestic law enforcement officials.
Increasingly, police are working with the military to conduct domestic law enforcement operations. “Indeed, the Army and other branches of the military have already been deployed domestically for precisely that purpose on innumerable occasions,” Watson notes.
He cites the following instances:
Military Police were tasked with conducting crowd control at the 2009 Kentucky Derby. Photographs showed MPs detaining a man who had run on the track.
In March of the same year, U.S. Army troops were dispatched to patrol the streets of Samson, Alabama, after a murder spree.
In December 2008, the Marine Corps Air and Ground Combat Center dispatched troops to work with police on checkpoints in San Bernardino County, California.
In April 2009, we reported on the deployment of 400 National Guard Combat Support Battalion troops to “maintain public order” at the Boston Marathon.
In the same month we highlighted how uniformed soldiers were involved in handling a car wreck in El Paso, Texas, during which a local ABC news reporter and his cameraman were arrested simply for something they routinely do every day as part of their job – filming traffic incidents.
These are just a handful of the incidents we have documented over the last few years where the military has been illegally involved in domestic law enforcement.
Back in 2008 the Washington Post reported how 20,000 U.S. troops returning from Iraq would be stationed inside America under Northcom for purposes of “domestic security” from September 2011 onwards.
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