by Doug Book
Since its inception in 2002, the Department of Homeland Security has grown increasingly contemptuous of the rights of the American people. Indeed, the Gestapo-like tactics of one of the Department’s better known masters of overreach–the TSA–are responsible for countless examples of the organization’s daily assault on the Constitution.
But recently, another of Janet Napolitano’s handmaidens of harassment has begun to make news…albeit only on the web, of course. It is the TSA’s Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response task force (VIPR). Organized into mobile swat teams, VIPR has executed some 8,000 highly public searches in the past 12 months.
And what meaningful operations they have been.
- In a Georgia Amtrak station, VIPR personnel “patted down” all travelers –children and adults — both entering and leaving the station;
- In Santa Fe, New Mexico, teams of VIPR agents were assigned to conduct searches at a high school prom;
- In Texas, agents thoroughly “searched all private and commercial vehicles entering and exiting” the port of Brownsville. Each and every vehicle was searched, even though the task force was not responding to any known or reported threat;
- In April, VIPR staged a raid at a Tampa bus station. Once again, the teams were not responding to any particular threat. Rather, Homeland Security official Gary Milano said the purpose of the exercise was to “invent the wheel in advance, in case we have to, if there is ever specific intelligence requiring us to be here”; and
- Two months later, VIPR targeted 5,000 square miles bordering West Virginia, Ohio, and Kentucky. Four hundred agents representing 70 federal agencies appeared in Black Hawk helicopters, small planes, and Coast Guard craft. Once again, this was a “training exercise.” As usual, no threat had been suspected or reported. TSA official Michael Cleveland stated, “[T]he purpose of the exercise was to have a visible presence and let people know we’re out here. It can be a deterrent.”
Exactly who is being deterred, intimidated, and threatened by these unnecessary shows of force? Certainly not terrorists.
“Uncontrolled search and seizure is one of the first and most effective weapons in the arsenal of every arbitrary government…Among deprivations of rights, none is so effective in cowing a population, crushing the spirit of the individual and putting terror in every heart,” said Justice Robert Jackson, the chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials.
The American people are being systematically subjected to, and desensitized to, warrantless searches and the most egregious and unnecessary forms of personal humiliation by an organization whose raison d’etre is inscribed at the TSA Air Marshal Training Center: dominate, intimidate, control.
The more often this is done, the more “reasonable” it will seem. Routine? Acceptable? Just like 10 percent unemployment, government harassment will become “the new normal.”
After all, it is for our own good.
To contact your Congressional Representative use this link: http://www.contactingthecongress.org/
To read more use these links:
http://www.rutherford.org/articles_db/commentary.asp?record_id=718
http://www.infowars.com/vipr-searches-and-the-american-citizen-’dominate-intimidate-control-’/
This article originally appeared on CoachIsRight.com and is reprinted with permission.
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I’ve seen this very recently (again) at http://www.infowars.com in an article dealing with the TSA motto,
“Dominate, Intimidate, Control”. And this sort of Bravo Sierra is the sort of thing that is going to start a Second American Revolution, with patriotic, freedom-loving Americans doing their damnedest to put a piece of hot lead in the cranium of every jack-booted thug who signed on to be a part of this nonsense. The federal government has so become the antithesis of ordered liberty, that if our founding fathers were alive today, they would be actively organizing the takedown of this regime. And this is *only* a regime, not our government.
See, the Congress doesn’t represent us (unless you’re a multinational corporation run by globalist elites); the Supreme Court does their level best to hear as few cases as possible, all the while disregarding the mandate of the Constitution as a limit upon government – and frequently ‘re-interpreting’ the Constitution in a manner that undermines Article V of the Constitution.
As a direct consequence, aided and abetted by the other two branches, the Executive has transformed itself into a near-dictatorship with unlimited powers. It arrogates to itself the power to do anything to anyone under the guise of national security (now ‘homeland security’); even to the point of kidnapping law-abiding citizens and imprisoning them indefinitely (…forever is a long time), or murdering them as declared ‘enemies of the state’.
The simple fact that the presumptive President of the US would cast aside due process, the Bill of Rights, basic human rights standards, any last shred of morality, and the Nuremberg Principle (which the USA crafted in response to the Nazi police state & Holocaust); all speaks to the utter illegitimacy of this regime.
It ostensibly would not limit itself to killing its perceived enemies. I can attest to this; in 2004 federal agents came to my home and threatened the brutal murder of my family if I didn’t cease from my lawful behavior as a freedom activist, part-time blogger and militia leader.
Any government that would threaten or actually murder innocent citizens to terrorize its political enemies is a terrorist regime, and should be dealt with accordingly. My story is not isolated, and let us not forget that the feds murdered dozens of innocent people in 1993 just to get to one un-indicted person of interest, David Koresh. Then two years later, that same government killed 168 others in Oklahoma City to destroy the physical evidence that was recovered from the first crime scene, held in obstruction of the investigation of the Texas Rangers – in an effort to keep that physical evidence from ever reaching a court of proper jurisdiction!
This all begs the question of whether elements within the federal government were also behind 9/11; some of the people involved in OKC just happened to be involved in 9/11. The federal government had motive, means & opportunity as in the first two crimes, and I strongly believe that OKC was a testbed for 9/11. Cui bono? the feds, of course.
“Dominate. Intimidate. Control.” Or, in a word, TYRANNY.