Agence France Presse/Raw Story:
Policing
Ein Volk, Ein Polizei, Ein National Applications Office.
“The National Applications Office”.
Sounds an innocuous enough name, doesn’t it? But, according to Lindsay Bayerstein’s latest article at In These Times, like Dickens’ Circumlocution Office it’s merely a euphemism intended to hide any amount of skulduggery and underhandedness.
The NAO is a Bushco creation intended to promote, market and sell valuable information obtained by military spy satellites about us to private companies and civil law enforcement – and no-one in the Bush administration can say, or is willing to say, exactly what or who gives them the legal right to do so.
The National Applications Office, which is schedule to go live on October 1, is an office within the Department of Homeland Security.
The NAO will serve as a clearinghouse for spy satellite data for civil applications (science and the environment), homeland security, and law enforcement (national, state, and local).
The NAO is a massive expansion of the dissemination of intelligence to an entirely new group of clients. The program raises serious constitutional and civil liberties issues. Also, the DHS has said little about whether making this data available to thousands of people across the country might compromise sources and methods.
[…]
When DHS officials were called to testify before the House Committee on Homeland Security in early September, they admitted that many of their standard operating procedures hadn’t even been written down yet! The top DHS lawyer declined to testify at all.
Lindsay’s put her finger right on what’s so disturbing about this latest develeopment,
The Skynet aspect of all this is disturbing enough, as is the subterfuge and the end-run around accountability – but that’s SOP for this bunch. What’s important is the the continued blurring of the dividing line between business, private security, civil law enforcement and the military. Soon there will be no dividing line at all, there’ll just one big amorphous ‘security force’ ith sweeping and draconian powers.
These days if you were to line up an officer of each you’d be hard-pressed to tell the difference: all have become little more than standard-issue paramilitaries and the government is pushing this militisation yet further. Even the Right is concerned.
I suppose this answers my question about what the Forest Service might need 700 tasers for. One security force, indivisible, with spy data for all…Bush may be stupid but he’s learned a lot from Argentina.
4. Consolidate power
Once a national security state has created a culture of fear and suppressed dissent, it may safely consolidate power, with minimal questioning by the media or challenges from dissident voices. In Argentina, power was consolidated in the military, which was given full control in the fight against “subversion.” There was no separation of powers between the executive, legislative and judicial branches – the military ran all three. There were no local or provincial elections either, and all local leaders were appointed by the dictatorship.
A key strategy of the Argentine dictatorship was to strip the judiciary of its powers. The National Commission for the Disappearance of Persons (CONADEP), a commission created by the first democratically elected government after the dictatorship, specifically cited the elimination of the writ of habeas corpus as a constitutional guarantee as part of the apparatus that allowed forced disappearances to continue.
Similarly, the Bush administration is trying to consolidate power in the Executive Branch. At the President’s request, Congress agreed to handover its war-making powers to the president first in Fall 2001 with the Authorization for Use of Military Force and next in Fall 2002 with the Iraq War Resolution. (8) The Department of Homeland Security was created to manage a variety of previously independent government agencies including: the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Secret Service, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the Coast Guard.
Remember that executive order Bush signed back in May? The one that enables him to take entire autocratic control of the US shoudl he declare it necessary in a ‘national emergency’, which he too gets to declare?
Not much point in being able to do that, if there’s a multiplicity of jurisdictions getting in the way of having your orders carried out. Better to bring it all under one big, convenient, dictatorial umbrella.
Tasers As A Litmus Test
The reaction of some allegedly liberal bloggers to the tasering of a student at a Kerry event speaks volumes to me about the normalisation of torture. For the writers it’s not an issue of whether tasers should be used on citizens in a free state at all and whether police should be allowed to render what is, in effect, a punishment without a trial. For them it’s merely an issue of who deserves it and who doesn’t.
Torture is becoming normalised – here, as if we needed much more proof is a demonstration of that normalisation:
Awww, how cute. This cute pink seal taser’s perfect for any budding little hitlerjiugend on your Christmas list. Imagine the joy on Christmas morning! No more childish bickering over the Wii…
Tasers even come in cool designer colours, like electric blue, black pearl and baby pink. Match your taser to your cellphone and go jackbooting in style! Not just handy for shutting up kids or getting rid of annoyingly on-point loudmouth sophomore journalists, tasers are a must-have for shutting up annoying relatives, cripples and the mentally ill:
Wheelchair-Bound Woman Dies After Being Shocked With Taser 10 Times
Wed Sep 19, 9:38 AM ET
A Clay County woman’s family said it’s seeking justice after their loved one died shortly after being shocked 10 times with Taser guns during a confrontation with police.
The family of 56-year-old Emily Delafield said it would take the Green Cove Springs Police Department to court, according to a WJXT-TV report.
In April 2006, officers with the police department said they were called to a disturbance at a home in the 400 block of Harrison Street just before 5 p.m.
In a 911 call made to the Green Cove Springs, Delafield can be heard telling a dispatcher that she believed she was in danger:
Dispatcher: And what’s the problem?
Delafield: My sister is waiting on my property.
Dispatcher: Your what?
Delafield: My sister (inaudible) is on my property trying to harm me.
Officers said they arrived to find Delafield in a wheelchair, armed with two knives and a hammer. Police said the woman was swinging the weapons at family members and police.
Within an hour of her call to 911, Delafield, a wheelchair-bound woman documented to have mental illness, was dead.
Family attorney Rick Alexander said Delafield’s death could have been prevented and that there are four things that jump out at him about the case.
“One, she’s in a wheelchair. Two, she’s schizophrenic. Three, they’re using a Taser on a person that’s in a wheelchair, and then four is that they tasered her 10 times for a period of like two minutes,” Alexander said.
According to a police report, one of the officers used her Taser gun nine times for a total of 160 seconds and the other officer discharged his Taser gun once for a total of no more than five seconds.
A medical examiner found Delafield died from hypertensive heart disease and cited the Taser gun shock as a contributing factor, the report said. On her death certificate, the medical examiner ruled Delafield’s death a homicide.
Did Emily Delafield deserve it, too? If not,why not?
“But she was in a wheelchair!” So what? She was armed. The Kerry protestor wasn’t armed – but if he deserved it, why didn’t she? Who decides who deserves it and who doesn’t anyway, the cops?
You see where we go when accept the premise that tasers can be used by a supposedly civilised society against it’s citizens? Right down the rabbithole.
Now if only they’d used the pretty pink seal taser on her, at least she’d’ve died smiling at teh cute and they might’ve avoided a lawsuit…
I don’t suppose this report will raise any more outrage with some liberal bloggers than did the Kerry tasering, though. One of the things that’s so shocking about the Kerry video is the way Kerry just let it happen and how the audience, inured to Jerry Springer-hype shenanigans, just sat there and watched avidly and worst of all was the approving applause from the audience – and some bloggers
If it were up to those bloggers being a pretentious writer and careerist publicity hound iwould be a crime deserving of summary judgement and umpty-thousand volts. Christ, if if that were the case then many of those same bloggers wouldd’ve been regularly writhing in agony on their own floors these past years. I suggest they go read their own archives, it can be a sobering experience.
There is at least one useful result though from the controversy; it’s causing a real sorting of sheep from goats as ‘sensible’ liberals come out as objectively pro violent repression, or at least pro when it suits them.
If now isn’t a time to choose which side you’re on – for or against creeping corporate neofascism – when is?
As Martiin points out, anyone who is in favour of taser use in any way, shape or form has taken a political position that’s entirely incompatible with any known definition of ‘left’ or ‘liberal’.These are the same bloggers who’ve appointed themselves the vanguard of the revolution and who’ve proclaimied themselves ‘the left’ – when what they actually are is anti-Bush and anti-Republican, which is not at all the same thing.
This is highlighted most clearly when it comes to authoritananism and policing: many self-described US liberals, when it comes to repressive policing, seem to consider it to be ‘for thee but not for me’. However much they might try to convince themselves otherwise to try and retain their alt credibility, they are conservatives, not liberals, because they don’t want to question the political system we live under, they want to conserve what they have, and if that takes harsh and repressive policing, so be it.
Crack a few jokes about prison rape and Scooter Libby, really stick it to the man, man, it’s all good snark – but ignore the fact of insitutionalised torture, sexuali abuse and modern slavery in US jails because that’s what’s propping up your own comfy lifestyle.
The Kerry incident brought out something very ugly in US liberal blogging – but it’s also served the useful function of reminding us just how skewed notions of left and right in US politics are and how useless it is to try and compartmentalise left and right when the entire public discourse, is slanted so far right to begin with that the Democrats, far from being the flaming communist atheists the rightwing media paints them as, are pro-free-market, pro-military imperialism and pro the status quo, and would be out on the right iwng of any given .eu conservative party.
Democrats are not the left or the good guys. You won’t see Democrats rolling back the police state when in power: just so long as it happens to people they don’t know or who they can easily despise and dismiss, and they don’t have to question capitalism and they get to keep their stuff, repressive paramilitary policing is no problem.
What I hope is that the furore of comments that’s resulted from their flip and callous reactions to the Kerry tasering has also caused some ‘liberals’ to examine their consciences and ask themselves what it is they really stand for when they accept taser use as a given.
If nothing else, the Kerry incident’s pushed taser misuse into the public spotlight, so I suppose you could at least count that as a plus.
More Taser Terror
Jesus’ General, whose indefatigable heretosexuality we salute, has an excellent post up on one of my favourite subjects, tasers, and the misuse thereof, as does Martin over at his own personal blog Wis[s]e Words. ( See also this description of the reporting of apolice tasering in Vermont from Blazing Indiscretions and many YouTube tasering videos, with outraged commentary, from LAist)
Given that these torture weapons are now in daily use by British police, even if they have no weapons training, a fact which seems to have been lost in all the media panic over the economy, it might be a good time to revisit the subject and see what it is we British subjects might now find ourselves subjected to should we presume to resist a police officer.
So here are my previous posts on the subject. and a sample of the kind of casual brutality that taser use encourages US cops to adopt and which has now been exported to Britain. An increasingly violent, repressive police force has been been enabled in pursuit of – what else – personal profit.
{…]
But it’s not just Texas and not just America. It’s a British issue too. UK Indymedia alleges:
A 15-year-old boy has been shot with a Taser gun during a police raid in Moss side Manchester.
Police “”claim”” the teenager began threatening officers during the search of a property on Broadoak Road in Moss Side on Monday the 15 year old child had to have a ambulance called after police appear to have used the Tazer on the unarmed child because he was dis-obeying officers after he became concerned at having the front door smashed in.
And Amnesty International reports:
Amnesty International today (16 October) expressed concern after a man died in County Durham, three days after he was shot with a Taser electro-shock weapon and a baton round. Brian Loan, 47, is believed to be the first person in the UK to die after being shocked with a Taser. A Home Office post-mortem reportedly found that he had died of natural causes.
It doesn’t take a degree in jurisprudence, criminology or psychology to realise that if you give people (and people inclined towards militarism and authoritarianism at that) weapons, tell them they are the less-lethal option and then put those people in stressful situations, that they’ll use them.
If it were just the stupidity, perhaps it could be dealt with by legislation banning the sale and use of the device.
Fat chance.
Taser has made multiple millions from producing and marketing cattle prods for controlling the populace and it’s had the help of many prominent UK and US government figures to do so: not least the horribly corrupt Bernie Kerik, (who Bush tried to make director of Homeland Security before his exposure) as have a host of other Republican worthies.
WASHINGTON – Bernard Kerik, President Bush’s choice to run the Homeland Security Department, made $6.2 million by exercising stock options he received from a company that sold stun guns to the department — and seeks more business with it.
Taser International was one of many companies that received consulting advice from Kerik after he left his job as New York City police commissioner in 2001, when he was earning $150,500 a year. Kerik remains on Taser’s board of directors, although the company and the White House said he planned to sever the relationship.
Partnering with former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and also operating independently, Kerik has had business arrangements with manufacturers of prescription drugs, computer software and bulletproof materials, as well as companies selling nuclear power, telephone service, insurance and security advice for Americans working abroad.
Even the UK police have made money from coercive technology:
THE American manufacturer of Taser, the controversial stun gun, gave the exclusive British distribution rights to a senior serving police officer who helped win Home Office approval for the weapon.
Inspector Peter Boatman had a 50% share in a company that sold Tasers at the same time as devising Britain’s first police training programme for the use of weapons.
Boatman was in charge of assessing the merits of Taser as head of operational training for Northamptonshire police and was regarded as an impartial expert on the weapon.
Since he left the force a little more than three years ago, his firm has provided 1,500 Tasers worth about £1m to 20 British police forces. It is the exclusive UK distributor for the US company, Taser International.
Disclosure of the apparent conflict of interest comes after Taser International, the US manufacturer, was accused of providing American police officers with share options potentially worth $1m.
Police repression is a dirty business all right:
Companies House records show that Boatman took a 50% stake in a start-up company, Pro-Tect Systems, in December 2000. He became a director of the firm on December 5 and resigned three weeks later, on December 27, but held on to his stake in the company.
In February 2001, Pro-Tect received the Taser contract for the UK. Within two months Boatman was acting as an adviser to the Home Office on whether to issue Tasers to British officers. He was “regarded as a national and international expert” on Tasers, Chris Fox, the former chief constable of Northamptonshire, said yesterday.
In December 2001, three months after the Home Office approved trial imports, Boatman publicly rebutted claims by Police Federation officers that Tasers could be dangerous. Boatman wrote “with sadness” to Police Review that “this technology is very effective — more than any other technique, device or equipment for establishing control over violent and dangerous subjects”.
He retired from the police on April 16, 2002. Two days later he was installed as chairman of Pro-Tect Systems. His fellow founding director and friend, Kevin Coles, had been running the firm in the meantime.
More…
The development sale and use of coercive technologies for controlling rebeliious civilians is a big business and a dirty business. If this were just an issue of a a few rogue cops acting outside their remit, then the problem could be solved by better training, legislation and codes of practice.
But there is just so much money involved and there’s so many vested interests in the sale and use of these torture gadgets, that their use will only proliferate.
When shooting an innocent man seven times in the head on a tube train while he’s going about his lawful, innocent private business attracts no opprobrium whatsoever for the guilty officers, then I don’t hold out much hope for any redress against an illegal police tasering.
Much more on police taser incidents at Bad Cop. No Donut!
Those UK incidents occured when the taser was just on trial with British police. Now that they’re available to any helmeted meathead, I fear that taser violence will become so prevalent, like polcie beatings, that it’s not even reported any more.
A Visit To The Green Zone
I freely admit to being a frequent critic of the US government on policy and procedure – with ample reason – but I have to say my dealings with the citiizen services section at the US Embassy in London over the past week or so have been a model of efficiency and pleasantness. They couldn’t have been more helpful and produced an emergency passport within 2 hours. By comparison the UK passport agency is a Kafkesque nightmare of stupid beurocracy, made ten timesworse by uneducated, rude and untrained staff and a rapacious charging policy.
Mind you, we had to go through what looked like the Norrh/South Korean border zone to get that exemplary service: roads leading into Grosvenor Square are closed, there are tank traps and steel barriers and armoured police with submachine guns at regular intervals and ID required at numerous checkpoints. If that’s not enough to intimidate, there’s the big fuckoff cameras on poles every couple of feet that swivel to watch you as you negotiate the maze of barriers and checkpoints.. I have no doubt there are armed police on the roof and on surrounding buildings too.
I wonder how much thiis must cost – and more to the point, who’s paying?
On my sporadic visits to the embassy over the past twenty years or so (the last time was 1996) the only apparent security has come from from the spit and polished, buzz-cut US marines in full dress uniform on guard at the imposing front doors, with a few desultory British plods lounging about outside for show. No doubt there was much more security than that, but it wasn’t so dramatically in-your-face as today. Then the public face of the US to its host countries was ebulliently confident, if not hubristically arrogant – it was the confidence of knowing it was the big kid on the block and could deal with any threat, even though there were arguably more threats from more terrorist groups then than there are now. There was no need to put up barriers and gun turrets: what the embassy said was ‘We are America. Come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough”.
But not any more, because they did come and have a go, largely as a result of that hubristic arrogance.
What the US embassy says externally (now that it more resembles a fragment of disintegrating Death Star, with all its bristliing antennae and visible armour) rather than power and confidence, is “We’re scared shitless and we don’t care who knows it”.
But I’m glad to say that the Americans inside themselves were, as always, cordial and efficient -and, as always, I wondered how people who are so cordial, pleasant and efficient can have produced such a fucked up government as this one.