LAS VEGAS (INTELLIHUB) — The FBI and Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department have been caught lying to the general public yet once again about events which transpired on the night of 1 October during the breach of the purported shooter’s hotel suite after an online sleuth discovered that SWAT fired at least 16 rounds into/through the adjoining door which connects Mandalay Bay room 32-135 to room 32-134, despite the fact that Clark County Sheriff Joseph Lombardo reported that only a three-round-burst was fired by one of his officers.
The following pictures, enhanced by John Cullen, reveal the astonishing details. Take a look at the holes in the door.
The adjoining door, looking into Mandalay Bay room 32-134 from room 32-135 (#IAMJOHNCULLEN)
Here is the photo again, slightly enhanced.
The adjoining door, looking into Mandalay Bay room 32-134 from room 32-135 (#IAMJOHNCULLEN)
You can count the number of bullet holes. There are 16 in total.
The adjoining door, looking into Mandalay Bay room 32-134 from room 32-135 (#IAMJOHNCULLEN)
Did a suspect or suspects escape by rappelling out the window of room 32-134 after SWAT breached and made forcible entry to room 32-135 on the night of the Las Vegas shooting?
Did a suspect or suspects escape by rappelling out the window of room 32-134 after SWAT breached and made forcible entry to room 32-135 on the night of the #LasVegasShooting?
Representatives from the seven countries (UK, USA, Germany, Italy, France, Canada, and Japan) known as the G7 which form the Council on Foreign Relations met to discuss what to do about extremist jihadi content on the internet. They want to work with tech giants to make sure anything that could recruit or train terrorists is taken down within two hours.
The United Kingdom actually proposed jailing anyone who even views extremist content online for up to 15 years! Of course, the governments will define “extremist content.” And as most things go, their definition will likely get looser over time.
For instance, when SWAT teams were introduced in America, the government claimed they would only be used in hostage situations. Today SWAT teams are used thousands of times a year, even for small-scale drug raids on non-violent suspects.
Practically anybody could be indicted for a crime if enough investigation went into their lives. There are so many laws, that we can’t go a day without breaking some statute.
Of course, most of us are not popular enough to draw the attention of U.S. prosecutors. But that is how they keep “the little guy” in line, by making examples out of the government’s enemies.
Reports indicate that Robert Mueller is on a fishing expedition to indict members of Trump’s team. If he can’t find any crimes, he will twist the law until something fits. Mueller and his team have done this in the past.
Here’s the tough thing about Big Brother technology. In the beginning, it really is just used against actual criminals.
In one instance, a woman’s Fitbit, a watch monitoring her activity, cast doubt on her husband’s story. He said she was murdered by an intruder. He told the police a story about when she came home, what she did in the time before the supposed intruder showed up, and that she ran down into the basement. Based on information from the device, they could see the story was a fabrication.
In another case, prosecutors successfully subpoenaed information from a man’s heart rate monitor which proved he was awake when he claimed to be asleep before a fire started. He is going to trial for the arson, and a judge ruled that the evidence will be allowed to be presented.
The problem is the precedent it sets. Much like the SWAT raids in the example above, this information may at first be used to solve arsons and murders.
But what happens when it is used to fish for crimes instead? Or to frame someone in the wrong place at the wrong time?
Unfortunately, this is how the government at all levels—federal, state and local—now responds to those who choose to exercise their First Amendment right to peacefully assemble in public and challenge the status quo.
Recently, this militarized exercise in intimidation reared its ugly head in the college town of Charlottesville, Va., where protesters who took to the streets to peacefully express their disapproval of a planned KKK rally were held at bay by implacable lines of gun-wielding riot police. Only after a motley crew of Klansmen had been safely escorted to and from the rally by black-garbed police did the assembled army of city, county and state police declare the public gathering unlawful and proceed to unleash canisters of tear gas on the few remaining protesters to force them to disperse.
As a USA Today article notes, “People demanding justice, demanding accountability or demanding basic human rights without resorting to violence, should not be greeted with machine guns and tanks. Peaceful protest is democracy in action. It is a forum for those who feel disempowered or disenfranchised. Protesters should not have to face intimidation by weapons of war.”
Bring in the militarized police with their guns and black uniforms and warzone tactics and “comply or die” mindset. Ratchet up the tension across the board. Take what should be a healthy exercise in constitutional principles (free speech, assembly and protest) and turn it into a lesson in authoritarianism.
Frankly, any police officer who tells you that he needs tanks, SWAT teams, and pepper spray to do his job shouldn’t be a police officer in a constitutional republic.
All that stuff in the First Amendment sounds great in theory. However, it amounts to little more than a hill of beans if you have to exercise those freedoms while facing down an army of police equipped with deadly weapons.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
There are other, far better models to follow.
For instance, back in 2011, the St. Louis police opted to employ a passive response to Occupy St. Louis activists. First, police gave the protesters nearly 36 hours’ notice to clear the area, as opposed to the 20 to 60 minutes’ notice other cities gave. Then, as journalist Brad Hicks reports, when the police finally showed up:
They didn’t show up in riot gear and helmets, they showed up in shirt sleeves with their faces showing. They not only didn’t show up with SWAT gear, they showed up with no unusual weapons at all, and what weapons they had all securely holstered. They politely woke everybody up. They politely helped everybody who was willing to remove their property from the park to do so. They then asked, out of the 75 to 100 people down there, how many people were volunteering for being-arrested duty? Given 33 hours to think about it, and 10 hours to sweat it over, only 27 volunteered … and were escorted away by a handful of cops. The rest were advised to please continue to protest, over there on the sidewalk … and what happened next was the most absolutely brilliant piece of crowd control policing I have heard of in my entire lifetime. All of the cops who weren’t busy transporting and processing the voluntary arrestees lined up, blocking the stairs down into the plaza. They stood shoulder to shoulder. They kept calm and silent. They positioned the weapons on their belts out of sight. They crossed their hands low in front of them, in exactly the least provocative posture known to man. And they peacefully, silently, respectfully occupied the plaza, using exactly the same non-violent resistance techniques that the protesters themselves had been trained in.
As Forbes concluded, “This is a more humane, less costly, and ultimately more productive way to handle a protest. This is great proof that police can do it the old fashioned way - using their brains and common sense instead of tanks, SWAT teams, and pepper spray - and have better results.”
It can be done.
Police will not voluntarily give up their gadgets and war toys and combat tactics, however. Their training and inclination towards authoritarianism has become too ingrained.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, if we are to have any hope of dismantling the police state, change must start locally, community by community. Citizens will have to demand that police de-escalate and de-militarize. And if the police don’t listen, contact your city councils and put the pressure on them.
Remember, they work for us. They might not like hearing it—they certainly won’t like being reminded of it—but we pay their salaries.
We must adopt a different mindset and follow a different path if we are to alter the outcome of these interactions with police.
The American dream was built on the idea that no one is above the law, that our rights are inalienable and cannot be taken away, and that our government and its appointed agents exist to serve us.
It may be that things are too far gone to save, but still we must try.
Gaithersburg, MD — Guns Loaded? Check… Extra Ammunition? Check… Bullet-proof protective vests? Check… Right home address? Uh oh! In yet another SWAT Team flub, a home has been raided, and its occupants beaten. However, once again, the police went to the wrong address.
The Carroll County Sheriff’s Office in Gaithersburg admits they got it all wrong when they burst into Israel Orellana’s home in Montgomery County. Orellana has the same name as the man police were searching for in a gun theft case. But still, incredibly, Carroll County got a warrant to search the wrong address. Worse yet, the group of people gathered in the home were church goers who were spending the night socializing and praying.
Orellana told reporters, “I thought it was my mom’s friends because sometimes they pray and they start dancing.” But that night, it wasn’t dancing which was disturbing his peace, it was officers of the peace doing so.
“So I get up from my bed and I start walking over to my door. And as I’m opening my door, I make eye contact with the SWAT officer and he pushes up against the door with his shield and he slams me against the wall.” Then, he describes what TFTP has all too often criticized, the charges of resisting arrest to free citizens who feel they’ve done nothing for which they should be arrested. “He starts screaming at me, ‘Stop resisting! Stop resisting!’” while the SWAT team raid continues to go down.
Orellana showed FOX 5 a bruise on his face and scrapes on his arm. He said his hands were tied behind his back and he was taken upstairs to find that his family and his mother’s friends were also detained. He says officers barged in on his 14-year-old sister in the bathroom.
“It was really horrific,” he said. “You feel really helpless during the whole situation. Like you know you’re innocent, you’re telling them you’re innocent, but they just see you as a criminal.”
The raid consisted of two counties working together to effect an arrest of another “Israel Orellana,” who was wanted in the burglary of 20 guns and money stolen from a residence. The police acted on video surveillance they’d acquired from casing the home but even armed with video imagery, the Carroll County Sheriff’s Office still got it wrong. They got a judge to issue a search warrant for Orellana’s home and then requested that Montgomery County police execute it.
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Both Israel Orellanas live in Gaithersburg and share similar appearances as stated by police who used Orellana’s driver’s license to determine identity.
Colonel Larry Suther told FOX 5 that an internal investigation will be conducted into the egregious error. “We’re going to take a hard look at how we got to that point,” Suther said.
Orellana says he wants the police to be held accountable for their actions, especially since his mother had to be hospitalized for the subsequent panic attack. She’s also battling cancer and currently undergoing treatment.
“She’s undergoing chemo, so her medicine puts her at high-risk of a heart attack…And when she had the panic attack, it was very serious to all of us,” he said. “This isn’t really about money to me. There needs to be action taken. People need to be held responsible, and they need to do a better job,” he emphasized again.
“Like, it’s just that plain and simple. They can’t be breaking into people’s houses just because I have the same name and I look like someone,” he concluded.
The Carroll County Sheriff’s Office issued the following statement, which, by the way, makes no mention of any promise to pay for any damages caused by the lawless home invasion.
The Carroll County Sheriff’s Office, following investigative leads in a case where numerous guns had been stolen from a residence in Carroll County, obtained search warrants for a residence in Montgomery County. Unfortunately, the suspect shared the same name and general location as an unrelated person, and investigators initially went to the unrelated persons address.
So, once again, as evidenced in the thoughtlessly prepared statement, the police are again blaming the victims, in no uncertain terms, that he was targeted because he had the same name, lived in the same general area as the suspect, and may have shared some type of similar appearance. Yes, that sounds a lot like racial profiling. Nice work men! Thank you for your service, now go fix Mr. Orellana’s home and pay for him and his mother’s medical bills.
Lake Elsinore, CA — Here at the Free Thought Project, we’ve seen some outright insanity when it comes to the actions of government and the police state. However, a grandma being raided by a NASA police force so they can steal her dead husband’s moon rock, is definitely up there.
When Joann Davis was 75, she hit some hard financial times after finding herself raising grandchildren following her daughter’s death and her son’s illness. So, being the resourceful grandmother that she is, Davis began to think of ways to earn some extra cash.
Then it hit her.
Her first husband, Robert Davis worked as an Apollo 11 engineer, and he saved a paperweight with moon material and another with a bit of the heat shield. Joann, who also worked for the space program at the time, came up with the idea that she’d ask NASA if they’d like to buy it from her, so she could raise some funds to feed her grandchildren.
Brilliant, right?
Well, to most people with common sense, this is a great idea. However, to the American police state, it’s a felony. Now, Davis is attempting to sue officials for the brutal and humiliating treatment she endured at the hands of NASA agents.
The lead agent “organized a sting operation involving six armed officers to forcibly seize a Lucite paperweight containing a moon rock the size of a rice grain from an elderly grandmother,” wrote Judge Sidney Thomas of the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals in the recent decision allowing Davis to sue, per the Los Angeles Times.
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Instead of telling Davis that it is against the law to sell moon rocks (yeah, we didn’t know that either), NASA set up an elaborate sting operation to nail this grandma — turned would be international moon rock fence — to the wall.
While Davis became excited to think that she’d finally get some financial padding by selling this moon rock, armed NASA agents were plotting away to take her down.
The sting would take place at a local Denny’s restaurant. These brave cops must’ve obviously known they were dealing with a hardened criminal when she asked to meet them at Denny’s.
The armed NASA agents then raided the Denny’s and forcibly restrained the dangerous 75-year-old grandma and her second husband who was along for the trade.
As they heroically protected society from the likes of a poor grandmother trying to support her dead child’s children, officers refused to allows Davis to use the bathroom. They forced her to defecate in her pants. Heroic indeed.
As Mercury News reports, Davis stood in the parking lot of a Denny’s restaurant in pants soaked in urine, answering questions from a federal agent about a rice-sized piece of moon.
“He kept saying, ‘You will be going to federal court, you will be going to federal jail,’ ” Davis said Friday.
“In the end, Ms. Davis spent her whole life proudly working for aerospace and the government, only to be jumped by a NASA-organized swat team because someone in NASA made a mistake and wanted to get it back,” said Davis’ Redlands-based lawyer, Peter Schlueter. “And they did it in a way that humiliated her.”
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As authorities made the case against the moon rock-dealing elderly woman, they likely garnered the attention of prosecutors on the way through the system. Eventually, those prosecutors would drop the case against Davis. However, not before she’d be arrested and brutally humiliated by NASA agents.
In this week’s ruling, according to Newser, the judges said Davis made a case that the detention violated her constitutional right regarding unreasonable seizure. She is suing agent Norman Conley, who “had no law enforcement interest in detaining Davis for two hours while she stood wearing urine-soaked pants in a restaurant’s parking lot during the lunch rush,” wrote Thomas.
In what world would it be considered in the interest of public safety to organize a sting operation, carried out by a team of armed agents, to kidnap and cage a woman for selling her dead husband’s moon rock to feed her grandchildren? Well, apparently, this world.
As Mercury News reports, Davis’ son died seven months after the incident. If Davis, who will be 80 next month, is successful in her suit, she says she would like to build a picnic area at Whitefish Lake in Montana as a memorial to both her son and her daughter.
It’s 1:30 a.m., a time when most people are asleep.
Your neighborhood is in darkness, except for a few street lamps. Someone—he doesn’t identify himself and the voice isn’t familiar—is pounding on your front door, demanding that you open up. Your heart begins racing. Your stomach is tied in knots. The adrenaline is pumping through you. You fear that it’s an intruder or worse. You not only fear for your life, but the lives of your loved ones.
The aggressive pounding continues, becoming more jarring with every passing second. Desperate to protect yourself and your loved ones from whatever threat awaits on the other side of that door, you scramble to lay hold of something—anything—that you might use in self-defense. It might be a flashlight, a baseball bat, or that licensed and registered gun you thought you’d never need. You brace for the confrontation, a shaky grip on your weapon, and approach the door cautiously. The pounding continues.
You open the door to find a shadowy figure aiming a gun in your direction. Immediately, you back up and retreat further into your apartment. At the same time, the intruder opens fire, sending a hail of bullets in your direction. Three of the bullets make contact. You die without ever raising your weapon or firing your gun in self-defense. In your final moments, you get a good look at your assailant: it’s the police.
This is what passes for “knock-and-talk” policing in the American police state.
Whatever you call it, this aggressive, excessive police tactic has become a thinly veiled, warrantless exercise by which citizens are coerced and intimidated into “talking” with heavily armed police who “knock” on their doors in the middle of the night.
Poor Andrew Scott didn’t even get a chance to say no to such a heavy-handed request before he was gunned down by police.
It was late on a Saturday night—so late that it was technically Sunday morning—and 26-year-old Scott was at home with his girlfriend playing video games when police, in pursuit of a speeding motorcyclist, arrived at Scott’s apartment complex, because a motorcycle had been spotted at the complex and police believed it might belong to their suspect.
At 1:30 a.m., four sheriff’s deputies began knocking on doors close to where a motorcycle was parked. The deputies started their knock-and-talk with Apartment 114 because there was a light on inside. The occupants of the apartment were Andrew Scott and Amy Young, who were playing video games.
First, the police assumed tactical positions surrounding the door to Apartment 114, guns drawn and ready to shoot.
Then, without announcing that he was a police officer, deputy Richard Sylvester banged loudly and repeatedly on the door of Apartment 114. The racket caused a neighbor to open his door. When questioned by a deputy, the neighbor explained that the motorcycle’s owner did not live in Apartment 114.
This information was not relayed to the police officer stationed at the door.
Understandably alarmed by the aggressive pounding on his door at such a late hour, Andrew Scott retrieved his handgun before opening the door. Upon opening the door, Scott saw a shadowy figure holding a gun outside his door.
Still police failed to identify themselves.
Unnerved by the sight of the gunman, Scott retreated into his apartment only to have Sylvester immediately open fire. Sylvester fired six shots, three of which hit and killed Scott, who had no connection to the motorcycle or any illegal activity.
So who was at fault here?
Was it Andrew Scott, who was prepared to defend himself and his girlfriend against a possible late-night intruder?
Was it the police officers who banged on the wrong door in the middle of the night, failed to identify themselves, and then—without asking any questions or attempting to de-escalate the situation—shot and killed an innocent man?
Was it the courts, which not only ruled that the police had qualified immunity against being sued for Scott’s murder but also concluded that Andrew Scott provoked the confrontation by retrieving a lawfully-owned handgun before opening the door?
Or was it the whole crooked system that’s to blame? I’m referring to the courts that continue to march in lockstep with the police state, the police unions that continue to strong-arm politicians into letting the police agencies literally get away with murder, the legislators who care more about getting re-elected than about protecting the rights of the citizenry, the police who are being trained to view their fellow citizens as enemy combatants on a battlefield, and the citizenry who fail to be alarmed and outraged every time the police state shoots another hole in the Constitution.
What happened to Andrew Scott was not an isolated incident.
As Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch recognized in a dissent in U.S. v. Carloss: “The ‘knock and talk’ has won a prominent place in today’s legal lexicon… published cases approving knock and talks have grown legion.”
In fact, the Michigan Supreme Court is currently reviewing a case in which seven armed police officers, dressed in tactical gear and with their police lights on, carried out a knock-and-talk search on four of their former colleagues’ homes early in the morning, while their families (including children) were asleep. The police insist that there’s nothing coercive about such a scenario.
Whether police are knocking on your door at 2 am or 2:30 pm, as long as you’re being “asked” to talk to a police officer who is armed to the teeth and inclined to kill at the least provocation, you don’t really have much room to resist, not if you value your life.
Unfortunately, with police departments increasingly shifting towards pre-crime policing and relying on dubious threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports aimed at snaring potential enemies of the state, we’re going to see more of these warrantless knock-and-talk police tactics by which police attempt to circumvent the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement and prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures.
We’ve already seen a dramatic rise in the number of home invasions by battle-ready SWAT teams and police who have been transformed into extensions of the military. Indeed, with every passing week, we hear more and more horror stories in which homeowners are injured or killed simply because they mistook a SWAT team raid by police for a home invasion by criminals.
Never mind that the unsuspecting homeowner, woken from sleep by the sounds of a violent entry, has no way of distinguishing between a home invasion by a criminal as opposed to a government agent.
Too often, the destruction of life and property wrought by the police is no less horrifying than that carried out by criminal invaders.
These incidents underscore a dangerous mindset in which civilians (often unarmed and defenseless) not only have less rights than militarized police, but also one in which the safety of civilians is treated as a lower priority than the safety of their police counterparts (who are armed to the hilt with an array of lethal and nonlethal weapons).
In fact, the privacy of civilians is negligible in the face of the government’s various missions, and the homes of civilians are no longer the refuge from government intrusion that they once were.
It wasn’t always this way, however.
There was a time in America when a person’s home was a sanctuary where he and his family could be safe and secure from the threat of invasion by government agents, who were held at bay by the dictates of the Fourth Amendment, which protects American citizens from unreasonable searches and seizures.
The Fourth Amendment, in turn, was added to the U.S. Constitution by colonists still smarting from the abuses they had been forced to endure while under British rule, among these home invasions by the military under the guise of writs of assistance. These writs were nothing less than open-ended royal documents which British soldiers used as a justification for barging into the homes of colonists and rifling through their belongings.
James Otis, a renowned colonial attorney, “condemned writs of assistance because they were perpetual, universal (addressed to every officer and subject in the realm), and allowed anyone to conduct a search in violation of the essential principle of English liberty that a peaceable man’s house is his castle.” As Otis noted:
Now, one of the most essential branches of English liberty is the freedom of one’s house. A man’s house is his castle; and whilst he is quiet, he is as well guarded as a prince in his castle. This writ, if it should be declared legal, would totally annihilate this privilege. Custom-house officers may enter our houses when they please; we are commanded to permit their entry. Their menial servants may enter, may break locks, bars, and everything in their way; and whether they break through malice or revenge, no man, no court can inquire. Bare suspicion without oath is sufficient.
To our detriment, we have now come full circle, returning to a time before the American Revolution when government agents—with the blessing of the courts—could force their way into a citizen’s home, with seemingly little concern for lives lost and property damaged in the process.
Actually, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we may be worse off today than our colonial ancestors when one considers the extent to which courts have sanctioned the use of no-knock raids by police SWAT teams (occurring at a rate of 70,000 to 80,000 a year and growing); the arsenal of lethal weapons available to local police agencies; the ease with which courts now dispense search warrants based often on little more than a suspicion of wrongdoing; and the inability of police to distinguish between reasonable suspicion and the higher standard of probable cause, the latter of which is required by the Constitution before any government official can search an individual or his property.
Winston Churchill once declared that “democracy means that if the doorbell rings in the early hours, it is likely to be the milkman.”
Clearly, we don’t live in a democracy.
No, in the American police state, when you find yourself woken in the early hours by someone pounding on your door, smashing through your door, terrorizing your family, killing your pets, and shooting you if you dare to resist in any way, you don’t need to worry that it might be burglars out to rob and kill you: it’s just the police.
While an embarrassing number of Americans still swallow the drug war’s laughably fictitious marijuana prohibition propaganda, SWAT raids to confiscate the plant ludicrously deemed illegal by the State kill people at an exponentially higher rate than weed, itself.
Cannabis has never been the cause of a fatal overdose.
Dataamassedby theNew York Times“or the most part, governments at all levels have chosen not to quantify the toll by requiring reporting on SWAT operations. But The Times’s investigation, which relied on dozens of open-record requests and thousands of pages from police and court files, found that at least 81 civilians and 13 law enforcement officers died in such raids from 2010 through 2016. Scores of others were maimed or wounded.”
Euphemistically-termed “dynamic entry” raids allow militarily-clad police to smash through doors with assault weapons drawn, demand anyone present comply immediately, and, far too frequently, shoot first and claim imminent threat later.
Such reprehensible exertion of control through violent tactics seemingly lifted from gestapo manuals — particularly to enforce the much-maligned prohibition of cannabis — was never the intended use of police SWAT. As theWashington Postexplains,
“The modern-day SWAT team originated in Los Angeles in the late 1960s as a way to deal with gunmen targeting police officers or civilians.But today SWAT teams are mostly used to handle routine warrant work, especially drug warrants.A 2014ACLU studyfound that nearly 80 percent of SWAT deployments were to serve search warrants.Just 7 percent of SWAT deployments involved ‘hostage, barricade, or active shooter scenarios.’”
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A patchwork of state laws now govern the legality of the plant falsely classified as lacking any medical value, as a Schedule 1 substance, by the FDA and Drug Enforcement Agency —whose own website hypocritically also states,“No death from overdose of marijuana has been reported”— making it possible to buy weed in a store in one state, and die because of it just over state lines.
Yet cops still maintain blank slate to crash through doors, ransack homes, confiscate property and cash, and — inexcusably — shoot to kill, even though the government knows its own cannabis prohibition is a scam.
Although debate furiously ensues over whether suspect or cop is to blame when headlines detail the latest traffic stop turned fatal shooting by police, in door-smashing SWAT raids, police always act as the aggressor. With adrenaline heightening fear and sometimes clouding threat perception — and inexplicable administrative mistakes, such as incorrect address — uninvolved parties pay the price with disquieting regularity.
“Innocents have died in attacks on wrong addresses, including a 7-year-old girl in Detroit, and collaterally as the police pursued other residents, among them a 68-year-old grandfather in Framingham, Mass.,”reportstheTimes.“Stray bullets have whizzed through neighboring homes, and in dozens of instances the victims of police gunfire have included the family dog […]
“In a country where four in 10 adults have guns in their homes, the raids incite predictable collisions between forces that hurtle toward each other like speeding cars in a passing lane — officers with a license to invade private homes and residents convinced of their right to self-defense.
“After being awakened by the shattering of doors and the detonation of stun grenades, bleary suspects reach for nearby weapons — at times realizing it is the police, at others mistaking them for intruders — and the shooting begins.”
Contrary to theTimes’ intimation, officers regularly shoot first — first, that is, if the subjects of the raid even possess weapons, or, if they do, regardless of whether or not they take aim at officers.
Innumerable tales of SWAT raids gonehorrifically awrydetail State-sanctioned maimings, the utter annihilation of property, slaughter of family pets, stray bullets finding unfortunate targets, and other gruesome outcomes — all for nonviolent crimes involving ostensively illicit substances the State made verboten for Americans it must condescendingly view as incapable of self control.
But times — and the national attitude toward weed — are changing. Over half of the states in the nation have shirked federal law in favor of medical cannabis, and eight states and the District of Columbia allow recreational use. Americans who believe the ban should be lifted in some way increase in number each time a survey assesses the national attitude toward the beneficial plant.
The United States undeniably failed in its bellicose campaign to eradicate ‘evil’ marijuana, but — as ineffective yet profitable policies go — cannabis prohibition remains official federal law.
A prime example of the inanity of profit-seeking trumping the prudence of lifting the ban on cannabis comes from a 2013 SWAT raid recounted by the Post, in which an informant — considered almost wholly unreliable in multiple analyses — snitched on Henry Magee for allegedly possessing 12 cannabis plants.
“Groggy and disoriented by the commotion”of a pre-dawn, door-busting police raid, thePostreports,“Magee grabbed a semi-automatic rifle and began firing in the direction of the door that the officers had just battered down. His live-in girlfriend, four months pregnant at the time, thought they were being robbed.
“When Magee and his girlfriend heard the police announce themselves, they immediately surrendered. By then, police investigator Frederich Sowders lay dead on the floor. They later recovered 10 marijuana plants and 4 ounces of dried marijuana from his home.”
A grand jury acquitted Magee of capital murder.
“All of us felt that if I were in bed and heard anything that made me get up and get a gun, and all of a sudden my door explodes in, I’m shooting,”one jurortoldtheTimes, adding in disbelief,“Why in the world would you do a full-out assault on a guy growing pot?”
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FRESNO, Calif. (CN) – A married couple claim Fresno sheriff’s officers destroyed their house by using it as a training ground for a teargas-wielding SWAT team, 50 vehicles, two helicopters, a K-9 unit and a fire truck — because an unarmed homeless man had been found in their closet.
David and Gretchen Jessen sued Fresno County and the City of Clovis on March 8 in Fresno County Court. They say the unconstitutional assault on their home was “excessive, unreasonable, violent, destructive … intrusive … unnecessary and unreasonable.”
The Jessens, who are farmers, say in their complaint that the sheriff and police used their house as a military battleground “because the Fresno County Sheriff’s Department and/or Clovis Police Department had found, by accident, the perfect location to conduct a training exercise on a rural home, on a dead-end street, in rural Fresno County, where ‘civilians’ were not present, ‘civilians’ were not going to congregate, ‘civilians’ were not going to observe or interfere with the military training assault on the Jessens’ home and the situation posed no risk of injury to the officers.”
In the lengthy complaint, David Jessen says it all started on June 11, 2016, when sheriff’s officers called him and said his house may have been broken into. He called his wife to tell her, then drove home and found four patrol cars in front of the house and officers scattered around the perimeter. One held a bullhorn and was yelling “come out,” and “hands up.”
An officer told Jessen that a homeless man had broken into his house after construction workers had kicked him out of a vacant house nearby. When asked if there were guns inside, Jessen said he had two unloaded shotguns and a loaded .357 magnum, all of them hidden so well that only he could find them.
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The officer told Jessen the man had threatened to shoot anyone who came inside and asked him and his family, who had just arrived, to wait elsewhere. After taking his family to a friend’s house 10 minutes away, Jessen drove back to unload some farm equipment and found law enforcement cars lining the road to his house for a quarter of a mile, plus two ambulances, a fire truck, and two helicopters circling above.
“Bewildered and baffled” at the show of force, Jessen says, he drove away and was passed by a SWAT vehicle and a crisis negotiation motor home heading toward his house.
Several hours later, deputies told him he could go back home. On the way there, Jessen counted at least 55 law enforcement vehicles. After parking and walking to his house, a SWAT officer told him the “operation” was concluded, and a second officer handed him a card and said “‘we have insurance for this.’”
Jessen says he had no idea what the officers meant until he went inside and found his home destroyed. Officers had ripped out the wrought iron doors to their home office and laundry rooms, pulled the office wall off the foundation, teargased six rooms, flash-bombed two of them, shattered a sliding glass door, broken seven windows and destroyed more than 90 feet of fencing with a SWAT vehicle.
“The magnitude of the damage to the Jessens’ home was unreasonable and unjustified, needlessly implemented to capture a single, surrounded, unarmed, hungry homeless person who posed no danger to anyone,” the complaint states.
In fact, the only things the homeless person stole were an ice cream bar, some milk, and half a tomato, according to the complaint. The Jessens say the cops could have arrested the man with a single K-9 team. But due to the excessive use of teargas, they had to gut the home, remove all the carpet and drywall, and can no longer live there. The costs of damages exceed $150,000.
READ MORE:Father Calls Police for Help with Troubled Son, Body Cam Shows Cops Kill Him Instead
Tony Botti with the Fresno County Sheriff’s Department said the department declined comment.
The Clovis Police Department did not return calls seeking comment Friday.
The Jessens seek compensatory and special damages, court costs and attorney fees.
They are represented by C. Russell Georgeson, with Georgeson and Belardinelli, in Fresno.
All the wars, the force, the government powers, the shadow funding, the mandate for security, for control, for safety will come around full circle.
In the end, all this force – this entire apparatus – is meant to be used against the general population.
The cumulative angst surrounding potential crises, emergencies and the swelling dissent and distrust between fellow Americans is reaching its own crescendo. As the system, already broken, is pushed to its limits, there will be consequences both expected and unexpected.
Those who have been counting on nothing but government to cover their expenses have nowhere else to turn to than violence, looting and civil unrest.
So too, to those who have been reliant upon store shelves and the electric grid. The day will come when those dependencies will become a dangerous, toxic weakness. The beauty and ugliness of this far-reaching conspiracy theory is not just that some extreme scenario could play out, but that in the near future, in a world dominated by urban cities, nearly every disaster that strikes its area will result in extreme reactions – desperate hoards, martial law to restore order, persecution of dissidents, violence and death tolls trailing behind.
And they are ready. The forces, each of the various agencies, military units, paramilitary units, special divisions, etc. have been training – exactly for this.
“Our current and past strategies can no longer hold. We are facing environments that the masters of war never foresaw. We are facing a threat that requires us to redefine doctrine and the force in radically new and different ways. The future army will confront a highly sophisticated urban-centric threat that will require that urban operations become the core requirement for the future land-force. The threat is clear. Our direction remains to be defined. The future is urban.”—“Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity,” a Pentagon training video created by the Army for U.S. Special Operations Command
What they’re really talking about is martial law, packaged as a well-meaning and overriding concern for the nation’s security.
The chilling five-minute training video, obtained by The Intercept through a FOIA request and made available online, paints an ominous picture of the future—a future the military is preparing for—bedeviled by “criminal networks,” “substandard infrastructure,” “religious and ethnic tensions,” “impoverishment, slums,” “open landfills, over-burdened sewers,” a “growing mass of unemployed,” and an urban landscape in which the prosperous economic elite must be protected from the impoverishment of the have nots.
And the creepiest part of this training?
Apparently, while the American electorate have been concerned about “draining the swamp” in Washington, D.C., the military have been concerned about “draining the swamp” in American cities during a major crisis.
Three-and-a-half minutes into the Pentagon’s dystopian vision of “a world of Robert Kaplan-esque urban hellscapes — brutal and anarchic supercities filled with gangs of youth-gone-wild, a restive underclass, criminal syndicates, and bands of malicious hackers,” the ominous voice of the narrator speaks of a need to “drain the swamps.”
[…]They are people who don’t support the government, people who live in fast-growing urban communities, people who may be less well-off economically than the government and corporate elite, people who engage in protests, people who are unemployed, people who engage in crime (in keeping with the government’s fast-growing, overly broad definition of what constitutes a crime).
In other words, in the eyes of the U.S. military, noncombatants are American citizens a.k.a. domestic extremists a.k.a. enemy combatants who must be identified, targeted, detained, contained and, if necessary, eliminated.
Welcome to Battlefield America.
For those who are old enough and engaged enough to have followed the last several cycles of American politics, this is a a disaster that has been decades in the making.
During the Reagan years, there was Rex 84 and other plans to control unstable populations during times of national emergency. Though the plan was highly secretive, the parts that did come out used the scenario of the need to deal with a mass wave of immigration from Mexico as the cover story, though the use of camps and detainment clearly implicated American dissidents and undesirables as well.
A scenario very close to this could play out today, with the Trump Administration planning massive deportation and attempting to institute a “Muslim ban,” while a huge wave of Americans on the other side of the fence are vehemently protesting his actions. It creates an atmosphere of tension, suspicion, and the emergency use of force, detainment, etc.
President George W. Bush presided over the passage of the PATRIOT Act and a bevy of executive orders and anti-American legislation that places the aura of surveillance, suspicion and control over the American people themselves, and locks down the system with a federally-controlled counter-terrorism apparatus that envelopes every aspect of the nation and its system of laws and regulation.
Just a sample of the far-reaching power that has been established over the past several U.S. presidents:
Executive Order #10995: Seizure of all communications media in the United States. Executive Order #10997: Seizure of all electric power fuels and minerals, public and private. Executive Order #10999: Seizure of all means of transportation, including personal cars, trucks or vehicles of any kind and total control of highways, seaports and waterways. Executive Order #11000: Seizure of all American people for work forces under federal supervision including the splitting of families if the government finds it necessary. Executive Order #11001: Seizure of all health, education and welfare facilities, public and private. Executive Order #11002: Empowered the postmaster general to register all men, women and children in the U.S. Executive Order #11003: Seizure of all airports and aircraft. Executive Order #11004: Seizure of all housing and finance authorities to establish Forced Relocation Designated areas to be abandoned as “unsafe.” Executive Order #11005: Seizure of all railroads, inland waterways and storage facilities, public and private. Executive Order #12919: Signs June 3, 1994, by President Clinton. Encompasses all the above executive orders.
Dark times, and the start of a very deep-seated tide of resistance and anger in the American people. With President Obama, a curve-ball, a fresh face not expected, and thus pacifying to the American people. But with his softer personality still came grave developments for the abuse of power by the federal government and the continuity of government structure. Countless executive orders and laws during his administration furthered the tyranny, and further cooked our problems with clashing parts of society. This was extremely evident in the racial and inner-city strife that became the hallmark of the Obama era.
It was less discussed how Obama signed the 2012 NDAA, and along with funding for the military, authorization to treat American citizens as potential combatants here at home on American soil.
Future presidents, however, could take up that power, and it won’t make any difference whether Barack Obama agrees with the rationale or not. There’s no reason here to languish here over whether President Trump will abuse that power, or that a future president might. The fact of the matter is that the temptation is there; the weapon is loaded. May cooler heads prevail.
But when something does play out, it will be military, FEMA, Homeland Security, local and regional police, special units, contractors, etc. who will be implementing the techniques revealed above – civil unrest will be stopped by any means necessary.
The military are literally training to occupy American cities, detain American citizens, engage anyone deemed to be a combatant, and restore order to entire cities, putting the lives of potentially tens of millions of people on hold, or upending them altogether. Will a crisis emerge, such as an economic collapse? Maybe the better question is, can such a crisis be avoided?
Maybe an earth shattering catastrophe has become simply too hard to dodge. If a big enough natural disaster doesn’t strike, the powers that be could simply engineer a crisis – financial, environmental spill, terrorist attack, urban riots – it really doesn’t matter what type of event.
This is because the fatal flaws of these cities – the problems of density, and supply vulnerabilities, and of clashing tensions between groups, and of abuse of power – will create immediate problems with each and every major crisis, just as rush hour ruins the afternoon of big city communities right on schedule every day. Nobody specifically orchestrated the gridlock, though they theoretically could have, and yet the natural problems of congestion virtually guarantee that traffic will not move, people will have accidents, get angry, and have nowhere to go and no way to get out of the situation.
The same metaphor will hold true for the next big urban disaster – any Hurricane Sandy could shutdown New York, Boston, Philadelphia, etc. if an evacuation is ordered, if a category 4 or 5 hits directly, if there is significant flooding, or property damage and loss of life is widespread, or another large scale terror attack takes place. The development of society has pushed more than 80% of the world’s population into cities, in almost every part of the globe. It is especially true in the United States and the western world.
The pressures are there, and they are real. They are waiting for the next crisis to unfold, and explode.
When prepping for what could happen, and how you will handle it, consider the many vulnerabilities of the city nearest you with a sober and careful eye. Whatever your strategy for survival, keep one foot out yonder, if indeed you must be tied to cities and urban areas like everyone else. Everything you know and take for granted in cities could collapse at a moment’s notice.
Last night, domestic terrorists on the UC Berkeley campus successfully barred conservative gay Jew Milo Yinnopoulos from expressing his opinion, after Antifa-incited riots closed down a speaking engagement. CNN - by the way, is in full propaganda damage control mode over this. Check out the CNN app notification popup:
And check out this headline:
Are you kidding me?
As fires raged and Trump supporters were assaulted with shovels and pepper spray by masked anarchists, the mayor of Berkeley, CA, Jesse Arreguin, allegedly ordered SWAT and campus police to stand down.
Here"s a picture from a redditor claiming to be 100 officers hanging out in the student union building while the violence was occurring (post):
A comment in the thread:
In comes the cavalry?
According to Mike Cernovich, Trump"s FBI is investigating:
Civil Rights section of FBI has opened an investigation into mayor @JesseArreguin, for inciting riots and ordering to police to stand down. pic.twitter.com/uy5EbgcvSm
Meanwhile, the rabid left is calling for a military coup.
You"re being ridiculous Sarah - and you"re a moron if you think the military isn"t with Trump.
By the way:
U.S. Code 2385:
Whoever knowingly or willfully advocates, abets, advises, or teaches the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying the government of the United States or the government of any State, Territory, District or Possession thereof, or the government of any political subdivision therein, by force or violence, or by the assassination of any officer of any such government; or
Whoever, with intent to cause the overthrow or destruction of any such government, prints, publishes, edits, issues, circulates, sells, distributes, or publicly displays any written or printed matter advocating, advising, or teaching the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying any government in the United States by force or violence, or attempts to do so; or
Whoever organizes or helps or attempts to organize any society, group, or assembly of persons who teach, advocate, or encourage the overthrow or destruction of any such government by force or violence; or becomes or is a member of, or affiliates with, any such society, group, or assembly of persons, knowing the purposes thereof—
Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both, and shall be ineligible for employment by the United States or any department or agency thereof, for the five years next following his conviction.
This article was written by Tyler Durden and originally published at Zero Hedge.
Editor’s Comment: Dissect this any way that you want. People are losing it, their sanity is coming unglued and there is an unspoken pressure that is eating away at the soul of America. If this is all it takes for things to break down, we’re in real trouble. Is this the scene of shoppers everywhere so desperate for a sale that their lives depend upon it? Is this economic pressure driving people to criminal behavior?
It seems clear enough that if any major disaster were to take hold in a major city anywhere in this country, it would bring out the absolute worst in a sector of society that has already been tested and brought to its limit. Emergency shortages will trigger panic and riots in sequence, as these people have almost been trained and conditioned to react that way. For every prepper out there, there are perhaps hundreds who have no threshold for disruption, hunger or want.
File this under ‘society is breaking down’…
Post-Christmas Chaos Strikes America’s Malls: SWAT, Gunfire, & Mass Brawls From Texas To New Jersey
by Tyler Durden
Two days ago, we reported that heading into Christmas, countless “mall brawls” had broken out across America’s as last minute holiday shoppers were filmed fighting with each other in shopping malls in New Jersey, Alabama, Georgia and other states for those last minute “holiday cheer” purchases. The videos made for for a very Unmerry Christmas.
Now, in the spirit of holiday symmetry, following the one day lull on Christmas Day, the brawls returned on the day after Christmas, with fights, disturbances and false reports of gunfire causing chaotic scenes and shutting down several malls across the United States on Monday, as shoppers scrambled for the best deals in the typically busy post-Christmas shopping day.
The first calls from the The Mills at Jersey Gardens came in just after nightfall Monday. Witnesses said they thought they had heard shots fired. That, along with a fight, led to what Elizabeth police Officer Greg Jones described as a “chaotic panic and everybody running all at once.” Eight to 10 people suffered minor injuries during a melee in the food court at the Jersey Gardens malls the mayor there said on Twitter.
Panic followed when someone shouted “gun,” after a chair hit the ground, causing a loud noise in the mall’s food court, Elizabeth Mayor Chris Bollwage tweeted.
The incident led to a SWAT team with riot shields and body armor raiding the mall, while shoppers either ran or hid in stores. No weapons were found and no-one was arrested.
Photos and video clips posted on social media showed heavily armed police officers responding to the incident as shoppers raced to exits and alarms rang out inside the mall.
Similar disturbances unfolded across the United States on Monday at malls that were packed with shoppers returning gifts, using gift cards they received over the holiday weekend or simply searching for clearance deals. Many involved calls of shots being fired and youths fighting. It was unclear if the incidents were connected.
As Reuters reports, a large fight between teenagers broke out in the food court at the Cross Creek Mall in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Police fielded several unconfirmed reports of shots fired, said a Facebook post by the Fayetteville Police Department, which also said the mall was evacuated.
The Cross Creek Mall in Fayetteville, North Carolina, was evacuated as police arrived to break up the fight. Claims were made that shots were fired.
“Once people start running in that area or chairs are getting knocked over, tables, that sort of thing, that echoes and it could resemble the sound of a gunshot to a lot of people,” he said.
Ref Cross Creek Mall. Reported shots fired. Unconfirmed. No shooting victims or property damage. Mall made the decision to evacuate, not PD
The Hulen Mall in Fort Worth, Texas, was on lockdown, Fort Worth police said on Twitter. The CBS website there reported that police said officers responded to reports of gunshots but arrived to find that several fights had broken out involving 100-150 people. There were no injuries, police said. Fort Worth Police spokeswoman Tamara Velle said officers initially responded to reported gunfire inside the mall. After breaking up the fights, officers stopped by each store to let people leave while the lockdown remained in effect, KTVT reported.
At least one fight shut down the Fox Valley Mall in Aurora, Illinois, late on Monday, and police were called to quell the disturbance, the Chicago Daily Herald reported, citing managers of businesses in the building.
Online videos showed uniformed personnel directing mall patrons out of the building and customers fleeing down an escalator. Police and mall management could not be reached for comment.
Hundreds of people (left) were in the vicinity of a food court brawl (right) in the Fox Valley Mall in Aurora, Illinois. Seven juveniles were arrested in the fight
In Memphis, Tennessee, seven people were arrested after incidents at two malls, CNN affiliate WMCA reported. Police said a group started a disturbance in the Wolfchase Galleria food court and started running, which prompted some customers to call 911, according to Fox 13.
Cops at Wolfchase Mall in Memphis removed both adults and juveniles.
An officer leaves Oak Court Mall in Memphis, Tennesse where police were called after a fight broke out and reports were made of shots being fired.
Then a crowd gathered outside Oak Court Mall, about 10 miles west, and started a disturbance, WMCA said. Both malls were cleared and closed early for the night.
Visitors to Oak Creek Mall linger in the parking lot outside as police patrol the area
The Town Center Aurora in Aurora, Colorado, was also closed early after multiple skirmishes were reported inside the mall, the Aurora Police Department said on Twitter.
Teens were tackled by cops at the Aurora Mall in Colorado. There were several large fights ‘involving juveniles’, cops said
Aurora PD spokesman Sgt. Chris Amsler said about 100 people had gathered in the food court before the brawls broke out — prompting the Colorado mall to close early on Monday afternoon. “(It) kind of morphed into this large disturbance,” Amsler said.
When off-duty police officers working as security guards tried to break up a fight, people circled the officers, who called for backup, Amsler said. As police officers on duty arrived, fights broke out throughout the mall, at a movie theater and at a nearby park-and-ride lot, he said. He estimated 500 people were involved. Authorities arrested five people, all juveniles, and recovered no weapons, he said. One person assaulted at the park-and-ride lot suffered “significant” injuries and was taken to a hospital, Amsler said.
The mall is closing early this evening due to a disturbance. No immediate threats exist. We will open tomorrow at 10 a.m.
In Monroeville, Pennsylvania, seven people were arrested after incidents at two malls, CNN affiliate WMCA reported. Police said a group started a disturbance in the Wolfchase Galleria food court and started running, which prompted some customers to call 911, WMCA said. Then a crowd gathered outside Oak Court Mall, about 10 miles west, and started a disturbance, WMCA said. Both malls were cleared and closed early for the night.
Shots were reported in both incidents, but police said they found no evidence of gunfire, WMCA said. No injuries were reported, CNN affiliate WATN said.
Police put the Arizona Mills mall in Tempe, Arizona, on lockdown after reports of shots fired inside the shopping center. Two people, including a juvenile, were arrested after two fights broke out at the mall, an ABC affiliate reported.
In Beechwood, Ohio, a juvenile was arrested for hitting a police officer after police used pepper spray to break up a fight that started about 6:30pm near a food court. Crowds were seen falling over themselves in a stampede towards the exits at the Beechwood Place mall, which went into lockdown as police investigated. Officers initially responded to the scene for a report of shots fired. Police later confirmed that there were no gunshots.
Shoppers rush into a wild stampede at the Beechwood Place Mall after a fight broke out and someone shouted – incorrectly, police said – that a gun had been drawn
Fire officials say a man and a police officer were exposed to the pepper spray and received medical treatment. No one else was injured. John Boyd, the 19-year-old who was hit with pepper spray, described the sensation to Cleveland.com. ‘My face burned… it went into my skin,’ Boyd said. ‘My whole body burned.’ It wasn’t clear what caused the fight, but police told USA Today that the incident had apparently been ‘loosely organized on social media’.
Finally, a fight at The Shoppes at Buckland Hills mall in Manchester, Connecticut, led to the mall being evacuated around 5:30pm, according to police. Video shows boys throwing swift jabs at one another while other youths crowd around to watch.
‘Up to ten’ teenagers were involved in the fights, according to police. One police officer was assaulted while trying to break up one of the first fights, authorities said, but didn’t seek medical attention.
Crowds peered through glass as boys threw punches at one another in The Shoppes at Buckland Hills mall in Manchester, CT. Several boys were arrested
There were several hundred teens in the mall when the fights broke out, and several were arrested, Manchester police Captain Chris Davis said on Twitter. There were no weapons involved and no sign that the fight was gang related, police said. It’s not known whether the rash of incidents across the country were coordinated in any way, or were just coincidental.
This article was written by Tyler Durden and originally published at Zero Hedge.
Shepard Ambellas is an opinion journalist, analyst, and the founder and editor-in-chief of Intellihub News & Politics (Intellihub.com). Shepard is also known for producing Shade: The Motion Picture (2013) and appearing on Travel Channel’s America Declassified (2013). Shepard is a regular contributor to Infowars. Shepard is the leading journalist covering the Las Vegas Massacre, logging over 1100+ hours, 160+ reports, during his ongoing investigation. Read more from Shep’s World. Follow Shep on Facebook. Subscribe to Shep’s YouTube channel.
