All right kiddos, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio, I'm Scott Horton.
I got Anti-War.com Senior Editor Jeremy Sapienza sitting in the studio with me today, here at the penthouse atop the JPMorgan Chase Bank Tower here in downtown Los Angeles, lovely downtown Los Angeles.
And we're joined on the phone by the great Matt Harwood, he writes for The Guardian and for Truthout.org, I don't know why there's a dash in between there, I thought it was just one word, but anyway, Truth-out.org, he's got a new piece that I don't like, it's called U.S. Government Report Argues for Police Force for American Interventions Overseas.
Kind of long and boring title, Matt, that doesn't sound very important, how you doing Matt?
I'm doing good Scott, how you doing?
Well you know, I got distracted and bored, I read that title and it has all these syllables and I'm not so sure it's such a big deal, what are you talking about here?
Well it's basically, it's a 183 page ran report from May 2009, a little dated by now, but basically it's arguing for paramilitary police force to send overseas into failing and fragile states.
So it's a continuing of the trend of nation building for the United States foreign policy.
Okay, so nothing to worry about, it's just creating death squads for the Colombian government, that kind of thing?
No, you know, back in 1974 we actually used to have this capability, but Congress actually scuttled it, or closed to it, you know, the ability to train police officers overseas for civilian operations in their countries.
And we got rid of it, because actually it was tainted by torture, once again, so I mean this is a repeating cycle in American history, where we go overseas, we either use the cronies that we use, and torture ends up happening.
So I mean obviously that is one of the chief concerns, but for other people it's just another extension of American nation building.
All right, well, get into the complicated part of the law here.
What does this have to do with the marshals, sirs, and the marshals, that means when a judge says, go and bring me a witness or whatever, that's who they are.
They're the very small, and yet, I guess we must assume, effective enforcement arm of the judiciary, right?
Yeah, but why they do this, why RAND wants them to put it in the United States Marshal Service, is because it can overcome posse comitatus, because originally this was, basically the U.S. War, the Army War College wanted RAND to do this study, and so they thought they were going to ask or recommend that they put it inside the U.S. Army, but RAND comes back and says, no, no, no, if this is going to be viable, you have to put it in the United States Marshal Service, because then it overcomes posse comitatus, and the people that you put in this unit can actually be embedded in local and state police agencies, so that they're training the whole time, and then when something happens overseas, they can be deployed.
So it would be, train them by using them as a national police force against us, so that then they can be useful in the next step that the Empire takes in Asia?
Yeah, I mean, it wouldn't be a national police force, I mean, the idea is to embed them in local and state police departments, because according to RAND, there is, I guess basically there's a labor shortage for local and state police agencies, and apparently according to RAND, this would be a good way to give state and local police departments the labor they need, and then also fulfill what they consider this national security need of the United States.
So these would be like SWAT type guys?
That's Jeremy Sepien.
Oh, hey, hey man.
Yeah, this would absolutely be SWAT, I mean, the stability police force that RAND talks about creating is precisely because of that.
They want high-end policing.
So say if, I guess a good idea would be, say Somalia, if they put them in Somalia, they would be kind of the in-between between combat troops and civilian police forces.
So they would do SWAT raids, they would go after terrorist organizations and criminal organizations.
And so as far as, well, when you talk about posse comitatus, I mean, I hope most people know what that means, but maybe they don't, right?
This is a law from 1866 or something, right?
Right after the Civil War.
After the Civil War.
Yeah, right after, during Reconstruction, it was basically barring the United States military from engaging in domestic policing.
Right.
And as long as the courts are open, all the civilian laws are supposed to be enforced, right?
Wasn't that the decision?
Absolutely.
The military should, I mean, there's a good reason for this.
The military's, you know, been trained to use overwhelming force, and we expect more from our police officers.
We expect them to respect the Bill of Rights.
Right.
I mean, in theory, the reason that the local sheriff abducts you and takes you to the local jail is to protect you from the mob that would get you for what you're accused of doing.
And he's there to protect your rights and make sure that you only get your life and liberty taken by fair process.
That's the whole theory, is to protect the rights of the suspect that's wanted for doing the bad thing that he's accused of.
Well, yeah, hopefully, so they get to the due process and get you to a good judge.
Yeah.
Well, so, I don't know, I mean, you say it's not a national police force, but you're talking about basically embedding soldiers in my local sheriff's department.
That sounds like a pretty big step toward the turning of America into Somalia to me.
Well, you know, it's interesting, because I asked a guy who's a big advocate of this.
His name is Lopreto in the U.S. Institute of Peace, yeah.
And he doesn't seem concerned about this at all.
He basically says, well, why not?
You know, he has more of a technocratic viewpoint of it.
It's that we need this.
Why not give it?
We'll give them the training that they need.
It will also help, you know, local and state police forces.
And therefore, there's nothing really to be worried for.
I mean, basically, he doesn't believe that, say, you know, police officers that are deployed in this, when they come back, are going to act any different within the populace.
I think that's a legitimate concern.
Well, of course, and it's already a proven fact.
I just read the Austin Chronicle, and you can see at least one major case.
I know there are much more of these that Will Gregg has covered on his blog and so forth.
There was one in the Austin Chronicle about an Austin Police Department officer who ended up chasing a guy through a parking lot who was, I forget, he was a suspect in a pretty minor crime.
And he's chasing him through a parking lot, shooting at him.
And the bullet ended up going through the back of a minivan and into the seat and into the car seat, the infant's car seat.
But luckily, the infant and the mother were inside shopping at the time, right there at the corner of Springdale and 183 in East Austin.
And the guy, he was a combat veteran from Iraq, man, and when you're chasing the bad guy and shooting at him, that's what you do.
And here he is, firing in an open parking lot full of my neighbors.
You know, this is already a problem.
Never mind, you actually keep him a soldier, you bring him home from Iraq, and you don't even make him a civilian cop.
You don't even tell him he's got a different mission.
You're still a soldier.
Now the Americans are your Fallujans to go patrol, to go do your SWAT raids on.
Well, you know, it's interesting, because I recently talked to an airman, you know, I won't name him.
And he basically just got back from Iraq.
And he was talking about when they touch back down, I mean, they need months to recover from what they've seen.
And I don't necessarily want to say what they've done and made it sound bad, but just the mission that they're out.
And, you know, they're out among a population that doesn't want them there, or that there is at least a sense of danger.
And he says, you come back, and you're just looking up at the roofs everywhere, because you just can't get out of that mindset that there's someone there that's willing to hurt you.
Right.
And then these guys become, you know, they come home, and I know this from veteran soldiers that have been friends of mine.
You come home from the Army, there's a thing in your mailbox right there saying, hey, you ever thought about being a deputy sheriff?
Starts at $80,000 a year.
You're just the kind of guy we're looking for.
Oh, yeah.
It's in your mailbox waiting for you when you get home from the war.
So on the one hand, these guys come home, and they have like so many of them have PTSD.
And then also, oh, here's a gun, and go run around and chase your neighbors.
That's why they say war is the health of the state.
Yeah, I mean, I know this is from, you know, last 10 years of talking to people, veterans, a lot of them come home wanting to be police officers.
Right.
And then I think more and more, they treat us like the people of Iraq all the time.
I mean, you listen to Tony Lugaranis talk about what it was like to deal with the Iraqi people on a daily basis.
And that frontline documentary, The Torture Question.
That's basically apparently how the average deputy sheriff, average city policeman sees the American people right now.
It won't be long before we have drones over every American city before we have to do eyeball scans to go through the red light and God knows what.
And we'll be right back.
We'll be right back with Matthew Harwood and Jeremy Sapienza, both after this, y'all.
It's Anti-War Radio.
Hang tight, Matt.
Yeah, probably.
This is the Liberty Radio Network, broadcasting the latest Liberty-oriented audio content 24 hours a day at LRN.
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All right.
Hey, I'm Scott.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I've got Jeremy Sapienza in studio with me here, and we're talking with Matthew Harwood.
He writes often at The Guardian, and he's got one here at Truthout.
That's truth-out.org.
U.S. government report argues for police force for American interventions overseas, and yet somehow it's all very domestic and under the U.S. Marshals Service.
And I was complaining as we went out to break.
For some reason, I always end up getting the last word as the music's playing.
Should be the other way around.
I was saying, look, they're turning the U.S. into Fallujah.
I mean, we don't have the depleted uranium dust everywhere yet, but we've, more and more, this is becoming the land of eyeball scanners and drones.
Of course, they're going to cover the entire American border with drones now.
And on one hand, there's an unlimited amount of laws and new laws all the time that apply to us, and yet there seems no longer to be any even semblance of law that binds the power of the U.S. state.
And that's the thing that's driving me nuts.
And now that I've gone ahead and made my declarative statements, you go ahead and say whatever you want, Matt.
Sorry, I couldn't think of a good question other than, what do you think of that, you know?
Well, I think going forward, it's probably important to just stress that what's happening, you know, the end of combat missions in Iraq and what's supposed to happen, you know, the end of the occupation of Afghanistan, the end of 2011, that even if we do pull out, that when you still have this type of philosophies running throughout the United States government, that our overseas missions just seem never-ending, that they're not going to end.
And the report even says that, looking forward, that we can probably use a stability police force to deploy to Cuba or to Sudan.
And you know, this was 2009.
So I'm thinking now, what, it just changes to Yemen or Somalia.
Yeah.
Hey, Matt, this is Jeremy.
So is this something that, once it's formed, could potentially be a lot easier to deploy than the military?
Like say, people going, we should have stopped the genocide in Rwanda.
Absolutely.
If we have this, we could just say, hey, send the police force.
Absolutely.
I mean, again, the gentleman that I was speaking with, Bob Frieda from the U.S. Institute of Peace, his big argument for me, why we need this, was exactly what happened in Baghdad in 2003 with the rioting and the looting.
And you know, a lot of people say this is when things really turn sour.
And he says, well, if we had a police force like this, maybe we could have stopped this, and maybe the occupation would have done better, and we would have been able to withdraw much sooner and faster.
Yeah.
Which is, of course, ridiculous.
Yeah.
I mean, that's the logic you're going to fight against.
Yeah.
Of course, it completely ignores who's who and what was going on in Iraq entirely, in order to make that claim.
If only they had killed more looters, it would have gone better.
Yeah.
Right.
Well, and I mean, there's something to the fact that there was no order.
They toppled the state, and then they let it be a free-for-all for a while.
But you know, anyway, it leaves out a lot to conclude that.
But of course, I mean, that really does cut right to the heart of the thing.
We want to, this is Democrat years, right?
This is Democrat empire.
And so we got to, we can't be quite as belligerent as Dick Cheney here.
But, you know, what we ought to do is invade with armies of cops everywhere in order to stabilize things for people.
And so we'll send in tons of State Department and USAID and whatever.
Diplomats, really.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Diplomats with machine guns and their mercs.
And they'll just come in and they'll make everything better for everybody.
And this is the kind of, it's really, that's maybe the basis of this whole thing, is we need a new PR push.
We need a new way to characterize our empire and our interventions.
I would say this is the flip side of Republicans near conservatism.
This is the Democratic version.
You know, this is the liberal interventionalist wing.
So they think, you know, we can go overseas and we can help people out.
I really genuinely think they believe that.
They just don't take into account all the really horrible things that can happen.
Yeah.
Well, and they don't take into account what they're doing to this society either.
It's kind of fun for me to see the elite class recognizing that, well, we're on our way down now or whatever.
But the way they characterize it to themselves is, well, America is still going to be the most dominant power on earth forever, but maybe a little bit less powerful than before or something.
They can't get their head around the idea that we're bankrupt, that they've driven this empire to the edge.
And now, now's the beginning of, you know, if this was Russia, this is the Gorbachev era, man.
The beginning of the dismantling and the falling apart of what they overdid.
Well, you know, it's always interesting for me to think that we have no one that's arguing for a foreign policy of peace in any way.
So you know, and I think these are kind of, this is a liberal way of being tough.
You know, we're going to be tough, but we're going to be tough and defend people.
You know, we're not, we're not going to go out and, and rule the world.
We're going to make the world a safer place for everyone else.
Yeah.
Well, let's see again.
But also back to the whole thing, because look, we're talking, we're, this show is for Americans basically, which means foreigners don't exist and whatever happens to them doesn't really matter because they never really exist in the first place.
So let's get back to how this is all about us because America is the center of the universe.
The sun revolves around the United States and all that stuff.
We all know that.
So why in the hell, if you want to make a bunch of a new brigade of MPs, why would it have to be under, uh, the marshal service, except as you said, this is a loophole around Posse Comitatus, but Posse Comitatus is not about preventing the military from being used against foreigners.
It's about preventing them from being used against us.
So here, this stability police force, they're claiming, is it, am I understanding you right?
They're claiming that they want to embed them with American cops so that the cops can train them and then there'll be for use overseas or that admitting that, yeah, they're going to be the military trainers of your local SWAT team running your local SWAT team.
And then if we send them off to kill people in Africa, then they'll go do that.
The way it's written in the report is, you know, it's very pragmatic.
Again, this is, this is the technocratic, this is the technocratic mindset here.
You know, there's a problem and this is the solution.
So they look at Posse Comitatus and say the only way, and basically what that means is that because they're going to be doing community policing overseas, where are they going to get that experience inside the United States when they're part of the military?
That way, if you put in the United States Marshal Service, they can be part of the local and state police, work the beat, learn community policing tactics, and then when they're deployed overseas, they'll bring that experience into places like, say, Baghdad, Fallujah.
Where they don't even speak the language.
Right.
And all these learning experiences are sure to be a one-way thing, because all these soldiers, all these, you know, Army Rangers and so forth, get embedded in our local police departments.
I'm sure they're just going to learn how to be nice from the local cops rather than the local cops learning in any way how to be more militaristic and belligerent than they already are against us.
And you know, this reminds me, Matt, of an article that was just in the, in the papers, I guess, two, three weeks ago, we talked about it on the show, where the Marine Corps is not under this guise, embedding with the LAPD and learning counterinsurgency tactics from the LAPD.
And of course, why is the LAPD the center of expertise in counterinsurgency tactics in America?
Well, because they imported all the counterinsurgency tactics from Vietnam for use against the blacks of South Central during the worst days of the CIA cocaine drug wars there between the Crips and the Bloods in the late 80s and early 90s.
And well, mid to mid 80s to early 90s.
And so the Marines have lost this knowledge, right?
A generation of Marines have gone by, and the LAPD has retained it for them.
So now the Marines are coming back to the LAPD to learn the tactics that they taught the LAPD a generation ago.
Well, let me ask you, did they actually say that in the article?
Because I would be really surprised if they made this connection.
Yeah, I think it was.
I think they did at the end of the article talk about, well, maybe not.
That might have been my extrapolation.
Hey, you want to hang on another 10 minutes and talk some more or you got to go?
You know what?
I could do 10 more.
All right.
Well, hang tight.
Everybody, it's Matt Harwood, German Sapienza 2.
You can sign up for the Liberty Radio Network email updates at updates.lrn.fm and join us on Facebook at facebook.lrn.fm.
Everybody, this is Anti-War Radio, I'm Scott Horton.
Got Jeremy Sapienza, Senior Editor at Anti-War.com sitting in the studio with me here, and we're talking with Matt Harwood.
He's at truth-out.org, and I Googled it during the break, and no, they don't make the connection to Vietnam.
I made the connection to Vietnam because I already knew that, that the Marines brought, or the military, anyway, the Army, somebody, brought their counterinsurgency tactics and taught them to the LAPD for use against the blacks during the blacks, for use against the people, the individual human beings en masse of South Central Los Angeles during the time when the CIA was, their agents, Erwin Manessis and, what's his name, Blandone, I forgot his first name, were bringing in 18 wheelers full, basically, of cocaine to be rocked up by Freeway Rick and then to have the drug territory fought over by the Crips and the Bloods.
So the government, of course, first of all, outlawed cocaine, drove up the price so much that the only way poor people can afford to use it is by rocking it up, and then they make it illegal so that only criminal cartels can control the distribution of it, and then they brought in a huge supply of cocaine because they wanted to pay for their secret illegal death squads in Nicaragua and El Salvador, and so then they had a massive drug war and they brought in the Vietnam clear hold and build and search and destroy and different counterinsurgency phoenix program type tactics for use against the Crips and the Bloods, and now, with no irony, LAPD to Marines, fight the Taliban like a drug gang, learn from us, we'll teach you how to protect and serve, is the headline at the LA Times blog.
So no, they don't make the connection to Vietnam, but I already knew that anyway.
How much money did they make off of that?
Because the drug war is the first thing that made me hate the state in the first place when I was a kid.
Wait, you're telling me they bring in all the cocaine and then they prosecute everybody for using it?
That doesn't seem fair.
Well, I was actually going to ask you, how much is the LA Police Department making off of that?
Oh, who knows?
I mean, I'd be willing to bet a third of their budget comes from the U.S. Treasury, although I don't know.
But, I mean, that's another problem going on.
You mentioned Will Grigg in your article, Matt, and something he's been writing about for a long time is the degree of control that comes with federal subsidy to local police, and there was even a case where someone was accused of damaging a cop car, I think in San Francisco, and the federal government said that it was a federal crime against them and their property because they own all the property of the San Francisco police because they subsidize it.
And so it was a federal crime and an attack on a federal cop car, even though it was not a federal cop car.
So you see the way these lines go.
And now, you know, your average police chief is an idiot.
He ain't political.
He doesn't know anything about checks and balances and separations of powers and the Constitution and things.
And if you asked him, hey, wouldn't you prefer to give up the money and the control and just have an independent little police department like it's supposed to be, he would say, you're crazy.
Who's going to buy me my machine guns and my tanks for use against you and your neighbors, Scott, would be his answer to that, you know?
Yeah, I mean, the Center for Investigative Reporting has done a lot of good work on that.
Just all that, you know, the Homeland Security funding and what state and local police agencies have been buying with that.
I mean, I think even one, it was a really weird one.
I think it was a rural town and they got a Humvee.
And they actually used it, I think, during, I think, for snow removal, to be honest with you.
I mean, just really interesting, interesting things.
Yeah.
Militarizing Mayberry.
That was a report that came out like 10 years ago where, you know, literally there are 18,000 different separate police jurisdictions in the United States, mostly county by county, right?
And that virtually all of them now have, at least if not on their person, they have a rack back at the base of fully automatic M16s.
They have armored personnel carriers and tanks of every description.
And of course, as we've explained on this show over and over again, it was Waco that opened the door to all of this.
The American people love that.
That's so cool, man.
You send in your tanks and burn a bunch of children to death.
Got a 93% approval rating the next day in USA Today.
And they opened the gates of every military base in America, wide open to every police department.
Come and send your guys to train with us and learn how to really kill people effectively and earn federal dollars.
The war on terror actually had a lot to do with this further militarization of these small towns.
And that when they were passing around all this funding for this anti-terror funding, they were dumping tons of resources on these middle-of-nowhere towns to protect the tallest green silo in America from the Al-Qaedas because they somehow would know about it and want to blow it up to demonstrate their power.
And so with this money, they're buying all this outrageous equipment that they could literally blow up their own town with.
Well, you didn't know Al-Qaeda's eco-terrorists, sir?
Well, hey, speaking of the end of the rule of law and whatever, they're taking all the so-called eco-terrorists.
Any environmental leftist who does a property crime at all, they take them and they put them in these, what's it called, the EMC or something?
I forget the initials, but it's the Special Administrative Unit or whatever to lock them down and keep them from communications.
Basically, it would be like if you were holding Ramzi Youssef for trial, this is where you'd keep him.
And this is what they're doing to left-wing activists all over the place now.
I mean, you had that with the animal rights extremists, Shack 6 and stuff.
I'm sorry?
Oh, I'm sorry, guys.
No, I was just going to say, I mean, outside of eco-terrorism organizations, which I guess is almost nonsensical now, I don't think anyone's really done anything right to terrorist crime, but they did it with the animal extremists, too.
They did it with, I believe it's what, the Shack 6 or the Shack 7.
They brought some type of weird statute, like the Animal Enterprises Act, and they put them away for many years, when it was just property crimes.
I mean, they probably should have been in trouble, but they shouldn't have been level with terrorists.
You know, they shouldn't have been considered terrorist organizations of any sort.
It's just a ratcheting up of everything.
And to go back to kind of what you were saying, even if, you know, you don't share our politics of anti-imperialism and human rights, just always, you know, learn from history that what we do overseas always tends to come back to us on our own shores.
So, I mean, that would be the practical argument.
Right, hey, that's our slogan at Anti-War.com.
War is the health of the state.
And since apparently people overseas don't have rights, at least if we make it about us, it's pretty obvious to see what happens to our liberty during wartime.
I mean, seriously, go down the list of the First Amendment, literally every one of those is threatened but the third, or completely gone by now, except the third, and the third is irrelevant, because as we're discussing, they can just build a garrison right down the street from your house, take the money right out of your paycheck to do it.
Yeah, I mean, again, you went back to drones.
I mean, I would think, if you're smart, you knew the minute that we saw a drone flying over Afghanistan or Pakistan that eventually it was going to be on our own borders.
I mean, it's just obvious.
Of course, yeah, and it won't be long before they're not predators, they're Reaper drones armed with Hellfire missiles, too.
What do you want to do?
You want us to send cops into dangerous neighborhoods?
That's not fair to them.
I was going to say, they could have fought the whole drug war with drones.
Right.
Yeah, they probably would have won if they just adopted Stanley McChrystal's targeted assassination program, you know?
Ah, jeez, I don't know.
I'm not sure what else to ask you, except, I don't know, how fed up are you?
I mean, I'm always fed up, but I trust the objective, since I've got to be the reporter.
Oh, right.
Yeah, luckily, I don't have to deal with that.
We can get into it.
I can be as fed up as I want.
I can rant and rave all over somebody else's interview and get away with it, too.
Well, actually, you know what, guys?
I can just tell you real quick, though.
What was interesting when I was doing this was, you know, everyone was trying to make it sound like it was theoretical, and I was saying, well, is there any movement on this?
Of course, Rand wouldn't talk to me at all.
U.S. Marshal Service wouldn't talk to me at all.
And then I talked to this guy from the U.S. Institute of Peace, Bob Perito, and he said there has been movement on this.
He said that there's been four federal entities have put forth plans for this, and two of them, he said, are federal law enforcement agencies.
He wouldn't tell me what they are.
But so it does show this is moving, although he told me that there is no movement from the upper echelons of the government.
So he said this is not something on President Barack Obama's agenda.
But then again, still, I mean, you have the rockets that are putting forth plans.
Yeah.
Oh, by the way, it was Communication Management Unit.
That was the new speak I was trying to come up with for the prison where if you're an eco-terrorist, you don't get to talk with anyone.
That's beautiful.
I love it.
All right.
Hey, thanks a lot for your time, Matt.
Thanks, man.
No problem, guys.
Anytime.
I'm sorry for talking over you at all damn times.
Yeah, no problem, man.
