HOW DOES 9-YEAR-OLD COME TO SHOOT ASSAULT WEAPON?

MOTHER JONES

How Does a 9-Year-Old Come to Shoot a Fully Automatic Weapon?

The Uzi tragedy in Arizona, explained.

—By Rebecca Cohen

| Thu Aug. 28, 2014 2:29 PM EDT

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An Uzi. Keary O./Flickr

A nine-year-old in Arizona accidentally killed her gun instructor on Monday when the Uzi he was teaching her to fire recoiled out of her control and shot him in the head. Avideo of the incident shows 39-year-old Charles Vacca switching the gun into automatic mode, then standing at the girl's side as she pulls the trigger and the weapon's force wrenches her arm in his direction.

Many commentators have since expressed disbelief—though not the NRA, which was busy talking up fun for kids at gun ranges—that a child was permitted to wield a weapon with such firepower.

But the shooting lesson was just normal business at the firing range where Vacca worked. Its "Bullets and Burgers" website advertises vacation packages like "Extreme Sniper Adventure": "At our range, you can shoot FULL auto on our machine guns," it reads. "Let 'em Rip!" It also says children between 8 and 17 can use its guns as long as a parent is present. The mother and father of the girl, whose name has not been made public, both were on Monday. Still, questions linger about the tragedy.

How did Burgers and Bullets get all those weapons in the first place? Isn't it illegal to possess fully automatic weapons in the US?
Under the federal Firearm Owners' Protection Act of 1986, it became a crime for civilians to own machine guns, but with a huge exception: Any gun made before the law went into effect is exempt. It's fine for civilians to resell and buy those old guns, too, as long as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives approves the sale. The approval process involves a $200 transfer tax and an FBI background check. A few states have banned automatic weapons entirely, but Arizona, one of the most gun-friendly states, is not one of them.

Can it really be legal for an elementary school kid to shoot an Uzi?
"Assuming it was a pre-1986 machine gun and the sale was legal, then yes," says Laura Cutilletta, senior staff attorney at the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.Federal law prohibits children under 18 from buying guns, but they can still fire them with adult supervision.

Less than three days after the tragedy, the Mohave County Sheriff's Office said it didn't expect to file criminal charges, according to CNN. Arizona authorities say the situation is being treated as an industrial accident, and job safety officials are investigating. So is the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

How hard is it to handle one of these guns?
Quartz's Gwynn Guilford did the math: With the average American nine-year-old girl weighing about 60 pounds, and the average Uzi weighing seven to nine pounds, "That would be roughly equal to a 40-year-old man firing a 25-pound gun like, say, the Hotchkiss M1909 used in trench warfare in World Wars I and II—a weapon so heavy it sat on a tripod." (Ironically, the Uzi is designed to be relatively light in the hands of an adult, which can also make handling its powerful recoil more tricky.)

The shooting range's manager said that the girl's parents had signed waivers and understood the range's rules. Still, he told the Associated Press, "I have regret we let this child shoot, and I have regret that [Vacca] was killed in the incident."

Has anything like this happened before and what might it mean for the national gun debate?
Sadly, this tragedy is not the first of its kind. An eight-year-old Massachusetts boy died at a gun show in 2008, when an Uzi he was firing at pumpkins kicked back and he shot himself in the head. The former police chief who organized the show and provided the child with the weapon was acquitted of involuntary manslaughter.

That incident did have one positive outcome, in Cutilletta's view: It inspired neighboring Connecticut to pass a law banning anyone under 16 from using a machine gun at a shooting range.

Shannon Watts, the founder of the advocacy group Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, said in a statement Wednesday that she hopes the Arizona case will galvanize the national debate about guns specifically with regard to children. "Our thoughts and prayers go out to the families of the victim and the young girl involved in this tragedy," Watts said. "We hope this event spurs dialogue on the importance of gun safety and responsibility."

Do deadly gun accidents involving children usually result in nobody being held legally responsible?
Indeed, that's the outcome in the vast majority of cases. A recent Mother Jonesinvestigation found that out of 72 cases in 2013 in which kids handling guns accidentally killed themselves or other kids, adults were held criminally liable in only 4.

MEDIA COVERAGE OF FERGUSON: TOTAL DISGRACE

COUNTERPUNCH

WEEKEND EDITION AUGUST 29-31, 2014

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The Media: When in Doubt, Blame Blacks

Bad Apples in Ferguson

by ISHMAEL REED

Given the fact that the Jim Crow media are dominated by the POVs of middle and upper-class whites, mostly males, it was no surprise that most of the commentary and reporting about Ferguson was managed by people who never experienced racial profiling. People like CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin, Harvard graduate and Harvard married, who has said that the charges of prosecutorial misconduct are ridiculous. Another know-it-all-nik named Marc Fernich, appearing on Al Jazeera on August 24,2014 called “preposterous,” a claim made by the St.Louis NAACP head, Adolphus Prultt, 2nd, that the police occupation of Ferguson was similar to how Palestinians had been greeted by the forces of occupation. He was unaware that Palestinians were sending advice to the residents of Ferguson about how to handle tear gas. Palestinian writer, Amer Zahr, in his article, August 17th,” BEING BLACK, BEING PALESTINIAN wrote “It is hard for me to see Ferguson through anything other than Palestinian eyes.

“The killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown, as he was unarmed and reportedly surrendering, has triggered protests in Missouri against aggressive police action.  The protests have been met, quite expectedly, with aggressive police action.  This aggressive police action will be met with more protests and on and on we go.  Sound familiar?

“The similarities between Ferguson and Palestine are stark.  Shared experiences, sentiments, and anger abound.  As it turns out, being black here and being Palestinian over there aren’t really that different.”

The smarmy Joe Klein waded in for Time about how black culture was responsible for the death of Michael Brown. He used the same argument in New York magazine   May 7,1989 that was typically lengthy and pompous piece about the Central Park Five. All about our morals from a man who lied about his authorship of “Primary Colors.” Of course, the five were innocent. Is there such a thing in journalism as plagiarizing oneself and getting paid by an organization like Time for engaging in this practice, repeatedly? No wonder FAIR calls Klein, “the media spokesperson for white people,” well he’s not quite white to young whites, who, according to The New York Times article about how the American Nazis are recruiting them. Klein is the guy who claimed, recently, and unopposed, that black men were responsible for the country’s rape problem. Black girls get raped by their mother’s boyfriends according to him. Tell that to the white co-eds who are raped by white men in college on a regular basis. Black men aren’t in college. They’re in jail.

We can’t get Joe to comment on the domestic violence against Jewish women in the United States and Israel. He’s part of the cover-up. How about a lengthy piece about this problem for New York magazine?

Predictably, just as the media were stenographers for the Pentagon during the Iraq war, they, like Marc Fernich, behaved as a sort of a press agent for Ferguson law enforcement and a cheering section for Darren Wilson, who might have shot an unarmed Michael Brown twelve times.  The media concentrated on the violence committed by a few, who were present in the mostly peaceful demonstrations and not on the violence of the police, who putout a lower case tonkin gulf propaganda spiel, which the media also fell for. All about Molotov cocktails provoking them into action. Three black ministers who were present where one Molotov cocktail incident was supposed to have taken place said that they didn’t see any. This gave the police, which was armed as though they were in Afghanistan, to assault men women and children with tear gas, while calling them “niggers.” Those who called 911 to report Michael Brown’s death, his body being allowed to lie in the sun for four hours (to show what happens when you fuck with the police), said that the dispatchers called them monkeys.

Fox News, Goebbels America, picked up a rumor about Wilson having his eye socket damaged by Brown. This lie was repeated by the Zimmerman/Wilson network, CNN. Their regular, Mark O’Mara, the character who lied about Trayvon Martin’s past and threatened the white women on the jury with the specter of black rape if they didn’t vote for an acquittal of Zimmerman. You could understand why some of the media would support Wilson, but The New York Times, whose editorial page, except for Paul Krugman, and Ishmael Reed from time to time, reads like a Tea Party Rally, was reprimanded twice by its Public Editor for behaving as a kind of pro bono defense counsel for Darren Wilson. First, Lawrence O’Donnell found support from the public editor of the Times when he accused the Times of floating a misleading line in its efforts to keep the right wing among its readership happy. O’Donnell said the Time’s report that there were “sharply” different versions among those who witnessed the shooting was false. In one front page Time’s story the murderer was called “well-mannered…soft-spoken…a good kid “while Michael Brown, who never killed anybody was “a teenager grappling with problems and promise.” When a cop killed Oscar Grant out here, a local paper called the cop, “a gentle giant.” Next the Times got into trouble when a black reporter wrote that Michael Brown “was no angel.” Answering “the storm” of protests that followed his comment, Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan wrote in a post on Monday afternoon that the “no angel” term was “an ill-chosen phrase”: ”In my view, the timing of the article (on the day of Mr. Brown’s funeral) was not ideal. Its pairing with a profile of Mr. Wilson seemed to inappropriately equate the two people. And “no angel” was a blunder,” Sullivan wrote.

Sullivan also interviewed the reporter who wrote the article, John Eligon, who said he agrees “no angel” was a poor choice of words. Eligon also said he pressed editors on another part of the article that’s drawn criticism – Brown’s interest in rap.

I tried to weigh in as someone who has experienced racial profiling, most recently when walking with my companion in the historic Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland. The people in the cemetery office called the police. They got there promptly. We had a hard time getting them to solve the drug traffic in our neighborhoods. Sometimes they didn’t even show up. Elderly members at our Crime Council meetings question, regularly, why the police are so chummy with the drug dealers. Wonder why. But they showed up about five minutes after I entered the cemetery. Maybe I was going to rob some graves? The Oakland police run the city. Though racial profiling is rampant, The East Bay Express has accused the current crop of mayoral candidates of supporting racial profiling. That’s because they brought police Chief Bratton out here to advise them on “stop and frisk,” and paid him a $200,000 consultant fee.

The Times told me that they had enough comments about Ferguson. The majority was written by white men. The police show them their Dr.Jekyll side. We get Mr. Hyde. These commentators are the ones who put out the lie that only a few bad apples in police departments are responsible for racial profiling; thirty police were involved in a scandal in Harlem Precinct in the 1990s.

I wanted to challenge the media’s use of polls to show that the issue of police brutality reflected disagreements between whites and blacks, when the police kill and beat the shit of Hispanics and Native Americans as well. Do the pollsters exclude the view of other ethnic and religious minorities like the Muslims who were spied upon by the notorious NYPD, because including them would challenge the views of their white readers and viewers? The people that Jeff Zuker of CNN and Comcast of MSNBC and Rush Limbaugh of Bain Capital’s  Clear Channel wish to woo. The people whom they depend upon to buy their shiny gas guzzlers and Viagra. Are the media again protecting whites from the charge that they’re ignorant of what’s happening between the police, to whom they give carte blanche to handle minorities anyway they wish, and the black Hispanic and Native Americans men and women who get murdered by the police on a regular basis. Unlike the toned down types, the black college professors whom MSNBC use to avoid paying full-time professional journalists like Michel Martin, black commentators like Earl Ofari Hutchinson and  Brooklyn-born rapper Talib Kweli were able to give a different account of what happened in Ferguson.

Davey D’s on KPFA’s “Hard Knock Radio,” and Amy Goodman’s “Democracy Now” had the best coverage because they aren’t beholden to media bosses to provide them with expense accounts and car. They interviewed people from the community and activists whose accounts on the ground were different from the accounts given by the police and the police friendly media. One woman told Amy Goodman that the Ferguson police broke down their apartment door and put 9 millimeter guns against her children’s heads because one of the kids didn’t tell his mother that he had received a citation for the theft of a Snicker’s bar. The three 10,11, and 12 spent thirty days in jail, while the criminals at Bank of America and Wells Fargo get to negotiate their fines. She said that her mother had warned her that the Ferguson police was a KKK outfit.

It took Davey D, Rose Clemente and Atty. John Burris to connect the police killings of Hispanics to that of blacks, which was ignored by the mainstream media.

After my Wednesday Aug.20th swim at the Berkeley YMCA, I ran into a retired 83 year old Hispanic judge. The situation in Ferguson came up. He said that there had been clashes in East L.A. between the police and Hispanics over police shootings.

On Thursday, Aug.21, Civil Rights Atty. John Burris, appearing on KPFA’s “Letters and Politics,” said there had been four shootings of Hispanics by Salinas, California’s police since March. In one case, a Hispanic man, Carlos Mejia, was attempting to solicit some gardening work. According to Burris, he carried the gardening shears in his hand. Someone called the police. The police shot him when he turned toward them after walking away. The video is eerily similar to the Michael Brown. After this May 20,2014 shooting, Hispanic demonstrators protested. Some threw rocks and bottles at the police.

On August 27,even Joy Reid, one of the best commentators, said that police shootings of black men represented a Racial Divide between blacks and whites and that it wasn’t of concern for other minorities. She should travel west of the Rockies from time to time or is she just following the memos from higher ups?

Predictably, Jeff Zucker’s CNN even rushed on a Town Meeting about a rating driven Black and White divide. No Hispanics appeared on the panel even though the police have used lethal against them as well. Apparently nuance doesn’t draw ratings. Native Americans have issues with police brutality as well. Joy Reid should read the online Native American news service, Indian Country, from time to time. But for the men who own and whose POVs dominate the media, we lie.

One of the origins of the term “Indian Summer,” is that Indians lie so much that an Indian Summer is a false summer.

One could conclude that since the word of whites has more credibility, historically, than that of blacks, not to include the testimony by Hispanics, Native Americans and Muslims about their sometimes terrifying encounters with the police is to isolate blacks and cast them as unreasonable malcontents. Paranoid even and whining about “victimization,”and set up for a mismatch.

Finally, E.J.Dionne and Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post discussed one of those White/Black polls on MSNBC.

You can understand why the regular pundits and their producers like Jeff Zucker might want to stage an opinion UFC match between Blacks and Whites for the entertainment of their viewers, but that these men of intellectual heft would cling to an outmoded model for race relations is depressing. The United States is no longer just Black and White.

Ishmael Reed is the publisher of Konch.  His information is at IshmaelReed.org.

Sources

1 Pacifica’s Mitch Jeserich hosts “Letters & Politics,” a look at burning political issues and debates, and their historical context, within the US and worldwide.(Burris interview was aired).

2 www.latinorebels.com/…/full-video-of-salinas-police-shooting-unarmed-,https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLK0eo26MgE

3 http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2014/08/21/separate-and-unequal-ferguson-has-implications-all-ethnicities-156516

4 http://fair.org/extra-online-articles/joe-klein-media-spokesperson-for-white-people/

5 http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/news/bratton-slams-dirty-30-sgt-article-1.728555

copyrigh© 2014 Ishmael Reed

POLICE IN U.S.: A MILITARY OCCUPYING FORCE

RUTHERFORD INSTITUTE

Are Police in America Now a Military, Occupying Force?

By John W. Whitehead 
August 05, 2013

Despite the steady hue and cry by government agencies about the need for more police, more sophisticated weaponry, and the difficulties of preserving the peace and maintaining security in our modern age, the reality is far different. Indeed, violent crime in America has been on a steady decline, and if current trends continue, Americans will finish the year 2013 experiencing the lowest murder rate in over a century.

Despite this clear referendum on the fact that communities would be better served by smaller, demilitarized police forces, police agencies throughout the country are dramatically increasing in size and scope. Some of the nation’s larger cities boast police forces the size of small armies. (New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg actually likes to brag that the NYPD is his personal army.) For example, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) has reached a total of 10,000 officers. It takes its place alongside other cities boasting increasingly large police forces, including New York (36,000 officers) and Chicago (13,400 officers). When considered in terms of cops per square mile, Los Angeles assigns a whopping 469 officers per square mile, followed by New York with 303 officers per square mile, and Chicago with 227 cops per square mile.

Of course, such heavy police presence comes at a price. Los Angeles spends over $2 billion per year on the police force, a 36% increase within the last eight years. The LAPD currently consumes over 55% of Los Angeles’ discretionary budget, a 9% increase over the past nine years. Meanwhile, street repair and maintenance spending has declined by 36%, and in 2011, one-fifth of the city’s fire stations lost units, increasing response times for 911 medical emergencies.

For those who want to credit hefty police forces for declining crime rates, the data just doesn’t show a direct correlation. In fact, many cities across the country actually saw decreases in crime rates during the 1990s in the wake of increasing prison sentences and the waning crack-cocaine epidemic. Cities such as Seattle and Dallas actually cut their police forces during this time and still saw crime rates drop.

As I point out in my new book, A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, there was a time in our nation’s history when Americans would have revolted against the prospect of city police forces the size of small armies, or rampaging SWAT teams tearing through doors and terrorizing families. Today, the SWAT team is largely sold to the American public by way of the media, through reality TV shows such as Cops, Armed and Famous, and Police Women of Broward County, and by politicians well-versed in promising greater security in exchange for the government being given greater freedom to operate as it sees fit outside the framework of the Constitution.

Having watered down the Fourth Amendment’s strong prohibitions intended to keep police in check and functioning as peacekeepers, we now find ourselves in the unenviable position of having militarized standing armies enforcing the law. Likewise, whereas the police once operated as public servants (i.e., in service to the public), today that master-servant relationship has been turned on its head to such an extent that if we fail to obey anyone who wears a badge, we risk dire consequences.

Consider that in 1980, there were roughly 3,000 SWAT team-style raids in the US. By 2001, that number had grown to 45,000 and has since swelled to more than 80,000 SWAT team raids per year. On an average day in America, over 100 Americans have their homes raided by SWAT teams. In fact, there are few communities without a SWAT team on their police force today. In 1984, 25.6 percent of towns with populations between 25,000 and 50,000 people had a SWAT team. That number rose to 80 percent by 2005.

The problem, of course, is that as SWAT teams and SWAT-style tactics are used more frequently to carry out routine law enforcement activities, Americans find themselves in increasingly dangerous and absurd situations. For example, in late July 2013, a no-kill animal shelter in Kenosha, Wisconsin, was raided by nine Department of Natural Resources (DNR) agents and four deputy sheriffs. The raid was prompted by tips that the shelter was home to a baby deer that had been separated from its mother. The shelter officials had planned to send the deer to a wildlife rehabilitation facility in Illinois, but the agents, who stormed the property unannounced, demanded that the deer be handed over because citizens are not allowed to possess wildlife. When the 13 LEOs entered the property “armed to the teeth,” they corralled the employees around a picnic table while they searched for the deer. When they returned, one agent had the deer slung over his shoulder in a body bag, ready to be euthanized.

When asked why they didn’t simply ask shelter personnel to hand the deer over instead of conducting an unannounced raid, DNR Supervisor Jennifer Niemeyer compared their actions to drug raids, saying “If a sheriff’s department is going in to do a search warrant on a drug bust, they don’t call them and ask them to voluntarily surrender their marijuana or whatever drug that they have before they show up.”

If these raids are becoming increasingly common and widespread, you can chalk it up to the “make-work” philosophy, in which you assign at-times unnecessary jobs to individuals to keep them busy or employed. In this case, however, the make-work principle is being used to justify the use of sophisticated military equipment and, in the process, qualify for federal funding.

It all started back in the 1980s, when Congress launched the 1033 Program to allow the Department of Defense to transfer surplus military goods to state and local police agencies. The 1033 program has grown dramatically, with some 13,000 police agencies in all 50 states and four US territories currently participating. In 2012, the federal government transferred $546 million worth of property to state and local police agencies. This 1033 program allows small towns like Rising Star, Texas, with a population of 835 and only one full-time police officer, to acquire $3.2 million worth of goods and military gear from the federal government over the course of fourteen months.

Military equipment sent to small towns has included high-powered weapons, assault vehicles and tactical gear. However, after it was discovered that local police agencies were failing to keep inventories of their acquired firearms and in some cases, selling the equipment for a profit, the transfer of firearms was temporarily suspended until October 2013. In the meantime, police agencies can still receive a variety of other toys and gizmos, including “aircraft, boats, Humvees, body armor, weapon scopes, infrared imaging systems and night-vision goggles,” not to mention more general items such as “bookcases, hedge trimmers, telescopes, brassieres, golf carts, coffee makers and television sets.”

In addition to equipping police with militarized weapons and equipment, the government has also instituted an incentive program of sorts, the Byrne Formula Grant Program, which awards federal grants based upon “the number of overall arrests, the number of warrants served or the number of drug seizures.” A sizable chunk of taxpayer money has kept the program in full swing over the years. Through the Clinton administration, the program was funded with about $500 million. By 2008, the Bush administration had reduced the budget to about $170 million, less out of concern for the militarization of police forces and more to reduce federal influence on law enforcement matters. However, Barack Obama boosted the program again at the beginning of his term, using the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to inject $2 billion into the program.

When it comes to SWAT-style tactics being used in routine policing, the federal government is one of the largest offenders, with multiple agencies touting their own SWAT teams, including the US Fish and Wildlife Service, Consumer Product Safety Commission, NASA, the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services, the US National Park Service, and the FDA.

Clearly, the government has all but asphyxiated the Fourth Amendment, but what about the Third Amendment, which has been interpreted to not only prohibit the quartering of soldiers in one’s home and martial law but standing armies? While most Americans—and the courts—largely overlook this amendment, which at a minimum bars the government from stationing soldiers in civilian homes during times of peace, it is far from irrelevant to our age. Indeed, with some police units equivalent in size, weaponry and tactics to military forces, a case could well be made that the Third Amendment is routinely being violated every time a SWAT team crashes through a door.

A vivid example of this took place on July 10, 2011, in Henderson, Nevada, when local police informed homeowner Anthony Mitchell that they wanted to occupy his home in order to gain a “tactical advantage” in dealing with a domestic abuse case in an adjacent home. Mitchell refused the request, but this didn’t deter the police, who broke down Mitchell’s front door using a battering ram. Five officers pointed weapons at him, ordering him to the ground, where they shot him with pepper-ball projectiles.

The point is this: America today is not much different from the America of the early colonists, who had to contend with British soldiers who were allowed to “enter private homes, confiscate what they found, and often keep the bounty for themselves.” This practice is echoed today through SWAT team raids and the execution of so-called asset forfeiture laws, “which allow police to seize and keep for their departments cash, cars, luxury goods and even homes, often under only the thinnest allegation of criminality.”

It is this intersection of law enforcement and military capability which so worried the founding fathers and which should worry us today. What Americans must decide is what they’re going to do about this occupation of our cities and towns by standing armies operating under the guise of keeping the peace.

WC: 1658

NRA CHIEF DEFENDS KILLING BY 9-YEAR-OLD

Assault Weapons Chief Says God Is On His Side

Written by Keith Shirey

 

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Topics: Death, Kids, God, NRA, assault weapons, machine gun

Saturday, 30 August 2014

REVOLVERS TOO MILD FOR 7-YEAR-OLDS

Commenting on the accidental murder of a nine-year-old girl's assault weapons instructor on a gun range, because of her inability to control her Uzi submachine gun, and thus blowing part of his brains out, Wayne La Pisse, Chief Gun of the NRA. commented, "oops."

La Pisse gave the same analysis when he remarked on the tragedy, six years ago, when an 8-year-old boy lost control of an Uzi and killed himself at a Massachusetts target practicing range.

In elaborating on today's "oops" remark, La Pisse said that children, as young as seven, have a "God-given right to shoot lethal battlefield weapons on America's gun ranges as long as their instructors have not exceeded their state's legal alcohol intake limits."

"We think it's worth death on the ranges, in order to enable other kids to have fun shooting at targets in preparation to kill the bad guys in successful U.S. military adventures like the War in Iraq. Too, target practice for seven-year-olds, wielding machine guns, prepares them for shooting birds and other small animals when they hunt with their macho, real men dads," said La Pisse.

"This is all a matter of religious values embedded in the fourth amendment to the U.S. Constitution," concluded the head of The National Rifle Association

Make Keith Shirey's day - give this story five thumbs-up (there's no need to register, the thumbs are just down there!)

The story above is a satire or parody. It is entirely fictitious.

WHAT IS THE ORIGEN OF ISIS OR ISIL?

So where did ISIS or ISIL or the ISLAMIC STATE come from? (The U.S. media can't consistently name the enemy whom they call a "clear and present danger" and a "threat to our national security interests?)

Thank Cheney-Bush-Rice and gang for invading Iraq, 'cause that stirred up Al Queda to come into Iraq after the invasion and ISIS is simply a mutation from Al Queda in Iraq.  (They weren't there before the U.S.' illegal, immoral war.)  

Sure ISIS is a group of crazy, immoral monsters and so we're now going to be allied with Assad to kill the bastards through air strikes in Syria?  

Oh, I thought Obama said he had to be removed from power because, among other things, he used chemical weapons on his own people.  Was he right then?  Is he right now, not to mention that and to fight Assad's enemies?  When was he right, then or now............it's so confusing?  

Maybe if Bush and Obama hadn't supported Shite assholes, who oppressed Sunnis in Iraq, ISIS would not have been born.  Better yet, if morons Bush-Cheney-Rice et. al.  hadn't stirred up a hornet's nest in the Middle East, with these non-states drawn up by the Brits, we would have never heard of ISIS.  

By the way, the mass media - which is beating the drums for war - has these "experts" who consistently speak of the U.S. national interest in the Middle East.  Just what is that?  Cheney is quoted under information gotten under FOIA has setting up geographical  divisions for oil companies in Iraq well before the war.  Is there a pipeline Big Oil needs in Syria, will they eventually get it?  Just sayin'.

 

CENTRAL AMERICAN KIDS HERE DUE TO U.S. DIRTY WARS

TOM DISPATCH

Tomgram: Aviva Chomsky, What's at Stake in the Border Debate

Posted by Aviva Chomsky at 5:00pm, August 24, 2014.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch.

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The militarization of the police has been underway since 9/11, but only in the aftermath of the six-shot killing of an unarmed teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, with photos of streets in a St. Louis suburb that looked like occupied Iraq or Afghanistan, has the fact of it, the shock of it, seemed to hit home widely.  Congressional representatives are now proposing bills to stop the Pentagon from giving the latest in war equipment to local police forces.  The president even interrupted his golfing vacation on Martha’s Vineyard to return to Washington, in part for “briefings” on the ongoing crisis in Ferguson.  So militarization is finally a major story.

And that’s no small thing.  On the other hand, the news from Ferguson can’t begin to catch the full process of militarization this society has been undergoing or the way America’s distant wars are coming home. We have, at least, a fine book by Radley Balko on how the police have been militarized.  Unfortunately, on the subject of the militarization of the country, there is none.  And yet from armed soldiers in railway stations to the mass surveillance of Americans, from the endless celebration of our “warriors” to the domestic use of drones, this country has been undergoing a significant process of militarization (and, if there were such a word, national securitization).

Perhaps nowhere has this been truer than on America’s borders and on the subject of immigration.  It’s no longer “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”  The U.S. is in the process of becoming a citadel nation with up-armored, locked-down borders and a Border Patrol operating in a “Constitution-free zone” deep into the country.  The news is regularly filled with discussions of the need to “bolster border security” in ways that would have been unimaginable to previous generations.  In the meantime, the Border Patrol is producing its own set of Ferguson-style killings as, like SWAT teams around the U.S., it adopts an ever more militarized mindset and the weaponry to go with it.  As James Tomsheck, the former head of internal affairs for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, put it recently, “It has been suggested by Border Patrol leadership that they are the Marine Corps of the U.S. law enforcement community.  The Border Patrol has a self-identity of a paramilitary border security force and not that of a law enforcement organization.”

It’s in this context that the emotional flare-up over undocumented Central American children crossing the southern border by the thousands took place.  In fact, without the process of militarization, that “debate” -- with its discussion of “invasions,” “surges,” “terrorists,” and “tip of the spear” solutions -- makes no sense.  Its language was far more appropriate to the invasion and occupation of Iraq than the arrival in this country of desperate kids, fleeing hellish conditions, and often looking for their parents.

Aviva Chomsky is the author of a new history of just how the words “immigration” and “illegal" became wedded -- it wasn’t talked about that way not so many decades ago -- and how immigrants became demonized in ways that are familiar in American history.  The Los Angeles Times has hailed Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal for adding “smart, new, and provocative scholarship to the immigration debate.” As in her book, so today at TomDispatch, Chomsky puts the most recent version of the immigration “debate” into a larger context, revealing just what we prefer not to see in our increasingly up-armored nation. Tom

America’s Continuing Border Crisis
The Real Story Behind the “Invasion” of the Children 
By Aviva Chomsky

Call it irony or call it a nightmare, but the “crisis” of Central American children crossing the U.S.-Mexican border, which lasted for months amid fervent and angry debate, is now fading from the news.  The media stories have been legion, the words expended many.  And yet, as the “crisis” leaves town, as the sound and fury die down and attention shifts elsewhere (even though the children continue to arrive), the real factors that would have made sense of what’s been happening remain essentially untouched and largely unmentioned.  It couldn’t be stranger -- or sadder.

Since late June 2014, the “surge” of those thousands of desperate children entering this country has been in the news.  Sensational stories were followed by fervent demonstrations and counter-demonstrations with emotions running high.  And it’s not a debate that stayed near the southern border either.  In my home state, Massachusetts, Governor Deval Patrick tearfully offered to detain some of the children -- and that was somehow turned into a humanitarian gesture that liberals applauded and anti-immigrant activists decried.  Meanwhile the mayor of Lynn, a city north of Boston, echoed nativists on the border, announcing that her town didn’t want any more immigrants.  The months of this sort of emotion, partisanship, and one-upmanship have, however, diverted attention from the real issues.  As so often is the case, there is so much more to the story than what we’ve been hearing in the news.

As labor journalist David Bacon has shown, the children-at-the-border story was first brought to the attention of the media by anti-immigrant organizations, beginning with the radical right-wing Breitbart News Network in Texas.  Their narrative focused on President Obama’s supposed failure to control the border, his timid gestures aimed at granting temporary legal status to some undocumented youth through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, the attempts of Congressional liberals to promote what they called “comprehensive immigration reform,” and of course those children “invading” the U.S.

In fact, there was nothing new about the so-called surge.  Rather, the Breitbart Network turned a long-term issue into a “crisis” for political reasons, and the media, politicians, and organizations on both sides of the political spectrum took the bait.

Breitbart’s Texas bureau chief Brandon Darby “ignited a national firestorm,” the network claimed proudly, when he released a set of exclusive photos of overcrowded detention facilities for child detainees.  Darby did not explain how he was able to gain access to what he called “internal federal government photos.”  He did, however, provide an explanation for what Breitbart called the “invasion”: the children “know they will not be turned away and that they will be provided for.”  In other words, it was the fault of Obama, the Democrats, and the liberals.  The stage was set for a Republican and populist backlash.

Pro-Obama voices like Deval Patrick and some immigrant rights organizations played right into the sensationalist nativist narrative.  “There’s a humanitarian reason to try to find a solution, try to find a way to help,” Patrick stated, insisting that at stake was an issue of “love of country and lessons of faith” -- and that it was explicitly not a political issue.

Massachusetts Republican politicians, like Lynn’s Mayor Judith Kennedy Flanagan, complained instead about the impact on their communities, turning a fiscal problem into an occasion for xenophobia.  “It's gotten to the point where the school system is overwhelmed, our health department is overwhelmed, the city's budget is being [un]sustainably altered in order [to] accommodate all of these admissions in the school department,” she stated.  State Representative Mark Lombardo concurred: “We just can't afford it. We're not adequately taking care of our own children; our own veterans, our own families who are struggling here in Massachusetts. We gotta put American families first.”

Hundreds of protesters rallied on the Boston Common on July 26th demanding that the country put “Americans before illegals.”  It was easy for wealthy liberals, many commentators added, to foist the children on poor communities, but what about the domestic poor, the homeless, the veterans who can’t get access to medical services?  Why, under such circumstances, should we direct resources to Central American children?  (Such Republican racial identity-based appeals to the white working class date back to the presidency of Richard Nixon.)

Which Central America?

These two seemingly clashing narratives -- the moral, humanitarian imperative to help children in need and the plight of strapped cities and Americans in need -- turn out to neatly complement each other.  Both play the game of victimology in the service of party politics.  Each asks essentially the same question: Do Republicans or Democrats get more points for defending the neediest victims?  Each side claims the humanitarian high ground, while both conveniently avoid looking at the political economy of the problem they lament -- and that they have, over many decades, collaborated in creating.

Unfortunately, many liberals and some immigrant rights organizations have failed to offer their own analysis that reached beyond generalized good will and support for the Democrats.  “We stand for justice and we care for all children in need!” the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalitiondeclared wholeheartedly, but not very illuminatingly.  In addition to “standing up for all kids,” the purpose of its August 7th counter-rally seemed to be simply to support Patrick’s offer to create temporary detention centers in Massachusetts.  Unfortunately, by disseminating Breitbart’s dramatic photos and adopting the right’s basic narrative, liberals missed an opportunity to go beyond a sterile debate and take a more meaningful look at the structural issues at stake.

In fact, the so-called “crisis” of these last months is anything but new, while the “debate” over where to temporarily detain the children is beside the point.  The number of Central American youths crossing the U.S.-Mexican border has been rising steadily since 2000.  Figures for minors apprehended at the border have gone up from a few thousand a year as the twenty-first century began, to 6,000-8,000 annually through 2011, 13,625 in 2012, and 24,668 in 2013.  Astudy released in February 2014 predicted that as many as 60,000 children were likely to be apprehended this year.  The overwhelming of U.S. detention facilities was, in this sense, predictable.  So Darby’s June news scoop should hardly have been a surprise, if anyone other than specialists had been paying attention.

The situation is not really hard to grasp.  There are three main reasons that Central American youth are crossing the border: they are fleeing lack of opportunity; they are fleeing violence; and they are seeking to reunite with parents and other family members already in the United States.  Although the media talk about “Central American children,” almost all of the detainees are, in fact, coming from only three of the six countries of Central America:  Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras.  There are almost none from Belize, Nicaragua, or Costa Rica.  Anybody who remembers the 1980s can probably guess why.  The enormous quantities of military “aid” that the United States poured into Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras helped create an environment of violently enforced inequality whose bitter fruits are still being reaped.

Under a series of laws and court decisions since the 1990s, minors from Central America are granted special treatment when caught crossing the border.  Rather than being deported like Mexican children (who cross in the same numbers and for similar reasons), Central American youth are turned over to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), which holds them in its own facilities (rather than U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers) and provides them with services while it locates and investigates family members to whom they could be released.  At that point, a lengthy hearing process begins to determine whether each minor is eligible for immigration relief.  If not, she or he will be deported.  These children are termed “unaccompanied” because they cross the border without parents or legal guardians, but the vast majority of them do have family in the U.S. and are coming to join them.

Deval Patrick and Judith Flanagan are talking past each other by focusing on different parts of this process.  Patrick offered to find a facility in the state to house the youth during the few weeks when they are in the custody of the ORR and fully funded by the federal government.  His “solution” is, in that sense, a cheap kind of “humanitarianism.”  Flanagan and the anti-immigrant demonstrators are complaining about the costs to communities like Lynn, where hundreds of undocumented Guatemalan children have indeed been released to family members.  They have a point.  As many online commentators have indicated, undocumented families tend to live in poor urban areas like Lynn that are already struggling with severe underfunding.  In other words, they are the communities least equipped to provide the kinds of locally mandated services like education that the newcomers need.

Why the Children Are Coming?

So what’s the real crisis and can it be solved?

Let’s start with what’s truly at stake here.  First, U.S. policies directly led to today’s crises in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras.  Since Washington orchestrated the overthrow of the reformist, democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, it has consistently cultivated repressive military regimes, savagely repressed peasant and popular movements for social change, and imposed economic policies including so-called free trade ones that favor foreign investors and have proven devastating to the rural and urban poor.

Refugees from U.S.-sponsored dirty wars in Guatemala and El Salvador -- mostly peasants whose communities had been subjected to scorched-earth policies and the depredations of right-wing death squads -- began to pour into the United States in the 1980s.  The refugee flood from Honduras didn’t begin until the United States supported a military coup against that country’s elected leftist president in 2009.  The youths crossing the border today are often the children and grandchildren of those initial refugees, and are fleeing the endemic violence and economic destruction left behind by the wars and the devastation that resulted from them.  In other words, the policies that led to the present “crisis” were promoted over the decades with similar degrees of enthusiasm by Republicans and Democrats.

Second, an enormous demand for undocumented labor had already drawn the parents of many of these children to the United States where they clean houses and yards, wash dishes, and grow and process food.  Their underpaid labor helps sustain the U.S. economy.  For generations, this country’s immigration policy has focused on using Mexicans and Central Americans as “workers” without granting them legal and human rights.  But workers are people and people have children.  In other words, the present crisis stems in part from the way our economy depends on separating parents from their children in order to exploit their cheap labor -- and then our horror or dismay when they want to be reunited.

Finally, the communities and school systems that the federal government expects to receive the border-crossing youth need more federal support.  Many of the locales receiving immigrants are indeed in crisis.  If, thanks to federal legislation and federal agencies, these children are being released in large numbers to communities in which schools are already underfunded, then the federal government should guarantee the services that it requires communities to provide them.  Instead of spending billions of dollars annually underwriting detention, deportation, and the further militarization of the borderlands, it should direct those funds to fulfilling human needs.

Immigrant rights organizations should be criticizing both parties for their policies in Central America (including President Obama’s free trade agenda), their economic and immigration policies (that criminalize workers), and the ways they are pitting immigrant youth against poor Americans in a struggle for scarce resources.

Of course, that’s not how the story is being told.  Instead, our politicians, the media, and various organizations have simply been posturing.  Arguments that take the “humanitarian” position and those that use the “crisis” to try to undermine the administration’s flimsy gestures towards relief for undocumented youth, as well as those that protest the potential impact on communities like Lynn, are sadly incomplete.  We are in the midst of a series of crises that are perfectly real.  They just aren’t the ones that either side is talking about.

Aviva Chomsky’s most recent book is Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal (Beacon Press, 2014). She is professor of history and coordinator of Latin American studies at Salem State University in Massachusetts.

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Copyright 2014 Aviva Chomsky