Cops

Dear Mr. President,

Today the New York Times reports that those commando-style squads of DEA agents (Foreign-deployed Advisory Support Teams, aka, FASTs) operating in Honduras and other Central American countries, are military trained, led by former Navy SEALs and use State Department helicopters. Last month they (or the Honduran Police) mistakenly targeted the wrong fishing boat and killed four innocent people – 2 of them pregnant women. Yesterday, an American agent killed a suspected drug smuggler. What is alarming is the increasing militarization of the nation’s “security forces” including not just government agencies like the DEA, the ATF, Homeland Security and the CIA, but almost every large police department in the country. During Occupy demonstrations in New York, Chicago, Oakland, San Francisco, LA and other cities, police responded with military-style discipline, tactics and force. Even university police departments, campus cops, have become increasingly militarized, pepper-spraying and/or beating peaceful demonstrators at, among other places, UC Berkeley, Cal State Fullerton, Santa Monica Community College and UC Davis. The implications of military-trained and coordinated police and sheriff’s departments are unsettling, the harbinger of repression and tyranny and the end of freedom and democracy. This is the war culture coming home, seeping into our psyche, bleeding into daily life. The friendly beat cop is no longer friendly; he looks like the Terminator, an anonymous black-suited jack-booted cyborg in full body armor, face shield and helmet, armed to the teeth and more than willing to use his weapons. They look, and are, menacing, unapproachable and unresponsive and there is a mentality that permeates them – like their predecessor Nazi Gestapo counterparts, they simply follow orders without question. Like one officer told a friend just before breaking up an Occupy encampment in San Francisco, “They pay me from the neck down.” This is the legacy of war. It doesn’t stay on the battlefield, it comes home and infects us all with its toxic poison. There are no victors, only victims, and there is no honor in war, only shame and reproach. We thought we were electing a peacemaker in 2008 but instead you prolonged and expanded war. You were a Trojan Horse, a wolf in sheep’s clothing. You lied to us, you lied to the world, and this will be your legacy, Mr. President, a liar and a warmonger who killed freedom and hope and justice around the world.