If you see military helicopters buzzing through your neighborhood sometime soon, don’t freak out. It’s probably a military training exercise.
Miami-Dade police sent out a warning Monday that multiple police agencies would be providing support for a joint military training exercise somewhere over Miami and elsewhere in the county. The exercise will include the use of military helicopters.
“This is routine training conducted by military personnel designed to ensure the military’s ability to operate in urban environments, prepare forces for upcoming overseas deployments, and meet mandatory training certification requirement,” the police statement said.Liberals and moderates enjoy laughing at wingnuts who believe in loopy paranoid memes. It'd be a little easier to make fun of those people if the military did not contrive to make those paranoid memes real.
In 2011, a similar exercise took place in Brickell, a Miami suburb. Here's a description and here's a video.
On Tuesday, Miami police officers in Brickell said that it was all part of a planned Homeland Security exercise, but confusion about the helicopters was rampant about 6 a.m. Wednesday.I suppose we want the boys and girls of Homeland Security to be well-trained, but aren't there places away from actual cities where the choppers can practice? These days -- as opposed to ten years ago -- I'd say that there are more people who fear "the gummint" than fear the terrorists.
It all began about 9:15 p.m. Tuesday, when at least three large Black Hawk-like choppers landed in a parking lot of the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts on Biscayne Boulevard and 14th Street.
The choppers then charged over the Brickell and Miami river area. Men who appeared to be SWAT team members were also seen taking part in the exercise.
Witnesses were tweeting as the event unfolded.
"Three choppers just dropped a group of men on top of the Bank of America building in Brickell," tweeted a man identified as Ianik Drouin, about 9:45 p.m
5 comments:
The narrative is shifting away from 'We're sportsmen; we're hunters"
Chris Matthews is talking about the 'Insurrectionists' who are now revealing that they need the same weapons as the police, because they see the police as the primary foe.
Where do they get this? It's not as if the cops aren't highly screened psychologically. They are public servants, after all. You just know in a national or regional emergency, they will be out on patrol, leaving their families at home, and at risk. It's not as if they are Authoritarian in their duties, seeking to exercise their legal bona fides, and viewing any disagreement with them as non-compliant. They always make you duck your head when they put you in the back seat of the patrol car.
And that's just local cops. Imagine the high degree of sophistication and desire to fully respect the rights of citizens on the State and Federal level.
I just can't imagine anything except the full confidence and support for any and all law enforcement actions, especially when no one is looking.
Ben
I'm basically a mechanic at heart. As such I love tools.
The only reason I would buy, modify, or make a tool would be because I had a need for said tool and intended to use it.
Laws are tools, too. Laws are created to address societal problems.
Given that, why was the PATRIOT Act created?
Why was the Military Commissions Act created?
Why was the Department of Homeland Defense created?
What problems are they meant to address?
Why does the US Military have Sound Weapons, Microwave beam weapons?
These are not weapons of war, they are crowd control weapons.
On whom are they intended to be used?
While I am not of the mindset of "the Government is coming to get us", I still have to ask myself why does the Government create laws and Agencies that make it legal to put you in prison without due process? To assassinate you if you are deemed a threat by an unaccountable commission?
What the hell are "Free Speech Zones"?
Anyway, I see it totally opposite from the right wingers.
I see these laws and the DHS as tools to prevent the exertion of popular will via protests, or an uprising of Americans who finally get how hard they are being screwed by the elites of this nation, not to thwart right wingers with guns.
To me these laws and the DHS are authoritarian creations, and authoritarianism has a definite rightwing bias.
Ever hear of an AK 47 carrying Tea Party member being pepper sprayed by the police?
While I understand what people on the right are afraid of, it is their ideology, their mindset, and their policies which could bring about the very thing they rail against.
Ironic? Not so much - it is how authoritarian followers operate. Methinks they fear a beast of their own creation.
It sure is odd that the 2011 exercise landed on top of Bank of Satan.
Could it be that the reason to do these exercises in public is so that the public will get used to it?
Although you, Joseph, far too often ban my comments, apparently because you think I give too much (albeit conditional) credence to the ravings of right-wing conspiracy nuts (with whom, I know, you've had way too much bitter history)-- I keep reading your blog and responding in a spirit of sharing and good faith.
And that Chris Matthews remark about the "insurrectionist danger" should be a trenchant clue for you, since your "Cops" posting is, IMHO, pointing at the correct-and-ominous forest, even if you still have some residual myopia about the individual trees.
As you probably guessed, I listen to Alex Jones much more often than you do, but I also despise him at least as much as you, and probably more. His covertly well-financed operation, along with many other "patriots" of his ilk, are skillfully using the very PR tools they demonize Edward Bernays for providing to the warmongers of yesteryear.
And the Jones-ians have been, from the seminal Waco barbecue days onward, carefully laying the groundwork for a future period of American history in which there will be cascading waves of federally instigated (via agent provocateurism) violent "patriot insurgencies" from coast to coast, supposedly NECESSITATING the full-force use of the militarized police-state mechanisms that a compliant Congress keeps erecting, piece by spooky piece.
It won't be just the corruscating advance of austerity measures and widening poverty (as the One Percent concentrate America's wealth into fewer and fewer of their lily-white hands) that bring the desperate and unruly masses out into the streets. The "liberal dream" of a massive gun-grab (when true progressives SHOULD be lobbying hard for a Wall Street Sales Tax instead) when it is finally attempted, is looking to be the essential spark to set off the Orwellian tinder box and subsequent, panoptican lockdown.
So which size boot will fit your face best?
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