Human Rights First Human Rights First

Stop the Militarization of Law Enforcement!

5-9-2011

By C. Dixon Osburn
Director, Law and Security Program

Help push back: write your member of Congress today!

There’s an effort underway to bring back torture and militarize law enforcement in the United States.

While former Vice President Dick Cheney and other proponents of “enhanced interrogation” techniques trumpet the role of torture in the hunt for Bin Laden, Congress is considering a bill that would disrupt our counterterrorism efforts and grant huge amounts of power to the President without the necessary oversight.

Write your members of Congress and urge them to oppose this bill by voting for amendments that would strip the bill’s key provisions from the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

H.R. 968 or The Detainee Security Act would :

  • Give the President unfettered authority to go to war in Iran, Indonesia, and elsewhere to fight terrorists;
  • Require local law enforcement and the FBI to turn over to military custody any terror suspects, including American citizens, captured in the United States without trial and;
  • Make the failed experiment of Guantanamo permanent by barring federal court prosecution of prisoners held there and barring repatriation of innocent men unless ordered by a court to transfer them.

This bill threatens to undermine national security by uprooting established counterterrorism tools and supplanting them with dangerous, untested, and overly-militarized procedures.

The FBI and local law enforcement have successfully elicited a substantial amount of intelligence information from terrorism suspects. And our criminal justice system has a proven track record of handling terrorism in the courts, convicting over 400 terrorist suspects since 9/11. The military commissions have only convicted 6.

Fight the militarization of law enforcement and federal courts! Ask your representatives to oppose the Detainee Security Act by voting for amendments to strip its key provisions from the NDAA.

The United States government already has broad authority and strong tools to disrupt, detain, and prosecute international terrorists under current law.

Congress should focus on strengthening established and effective counterterrorism tools, rather than expanding costly, unpopular wars and enshrining Guantanamo as a permanent fixture of second-class justice.


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Posted in Blog | 4 Comments »

  • nemo

    I hate to say this, but this is the only logical direction the War on Drugs would lead…and where were all the ‘progressive’ voices speaking out against said War on Drugs – and ACTING TO END IT?

    This militarization of police was allowed to take place under the rubric of ‘saving the childrennnnnn from druuuuuuugs!’ so it was ‘anything goes’ when it came to how LE treated ‘civilians’ (as if LE was special class of citizenship above us mere mundanes). And too many ‘progressives’ were afraid to say anything since they allowed the forces of authoritarianism to ‘frame’ the debate (when there ever was one) to make it appear that only deviants and perverts out to seduce our kiddies would dare act against the (racist and bigoted) drug laws. That cowed silence sowed the ‘children of the Hydra’s teeth’.

    You reap what you sow. And the crop is wearing jackboots.

  • malcolm kyle

    Prohibitionists often express the belief that the resulting suffering and mayhem that their policy engenders is in no way connected to the basic and erroneous mechanism being used, but that they simply haven’t been granted sufficient governmental powers, i.e., the removal of even more of our basic individual rights and freedoms for these sadistic, sociopathic perverts to do their work successfully.

    It’s quite possible, that many of the early Prohibitionists did not intend to kill hundreds of thousands worldwide or put 1 in every 32 Americans under supervision of the correctional system. Nevertheless, it may now be reasonable to claim, that our Latter-Day Sadomoralist Prison-for-Profit Prohibitionists don’t care. They don’t care that, historically, the prohibition of any mind altering substance has never resulted in anything else but mayhem and chaos. They don’t care that America has the highest percentage of it’s citizens incarcerated of any country in the history of the planet. And they don’t care about spawning far worse conditions than those they claim to be alleviating. These despotic imbeciles are actually quite happy to create as much mayhem as possible, after all, it’s what fills their prisons and gets them elected. Which is why it’s no surprise, that when asked if they support torture, prohibitionist, GOP Presidential candidates rush to raise their hands. http://www.drugwarrant.com/2011/05/torture-and-drug-policy/

    Here’s what the UK Economist Magazine thinks of us: “Never in the civilised world have so many been locked up for so little” http://www.economist.com/node/16636027

    According to Paul Craig Roberts, a former editor of the Wall Street Journal and former assistant secretary to the treasury under Ronald Reagan, “Police in the US now rival criminals, and exceed terrorists as the greatest threat to the American public.”
    http://www.newstatesman.com/north-america/2011/04/orleans-city-jail-police

    There is no conflict between liberty and safety. We will have both or neither.
    Ramsey Clark (1927–)

    • http://www.google.com/ Lucka

      Big help, big help. And suerpalitve news of course.

  • Randy

    Marine murdered by Pima County Sheriffs Dept.

    Jose Guerena, 26, a former Marine, was sleeping after the graveyard shift at Asarco Mission mine about 9:30 a.m. when his wife woke him saying she heard noises outside and a man was at their window. Guerena told his wife to hide in a closet with their 4-year-old son, his wife has said. He grabbed an AR-15 rifle and moments later was slumped in the kitchen, mortally wounded from a hail of gunfire.

    The Pima County Sheriff’s Department has provided no details about the investigation that prompted the raid and little information about the moments leading up to 71 gunshots being fired at Guerena, whose gun had the safety on. He was shot 60 times, doctors told the family. Initially the Sheriff’s Department said Guerena fired at officers, but they retracted that this week. Drexel Heights provided audio of the 911 calls after the Star filed a public records request.

    http://azstarnet.com/news/local/crime/article_b3177522-baa0-5c9e-9f0d-d3d7da6e9e4b.html