Analyst's note: Absolutely must read. I have parsed some of this to remove terms and language that are inflammatory. I have also truncated the article since it goes into other unrelated incidents of abuse by policeman. The parts that are notable are those that discuss a situation where school officials and police are participating in paramilitary role play and that the police in particular are being told that they are soldiers and not peace officers….. This appears about 2/3rds of the way into the article.
This seems to show more evidence of the para-militarization of our law enforcement institutions. Couple this with the last several years of violent mistakes and abuses by SWAT groups and you have a brewing system of abuses that trample Constitutional rights and get people injured and even killed.
(P.S. Yes the author is a bit of a conspiracy nut but it does not change the facts surrounding the training that law enforcement officers are receiving across the country that resembles military training… also…. Obviously emphasis is mine…)
"It was Friday the 13th, and Skylar Walters thought he was going to die.
The 16-year-old [student] of Orangeville Jr.-Sr. High in Illinois was in gym class when a deranged-looking man barged into the school and began firing what appeared to be a handgun at several of the other students.
"I started praying to God and saying my last words," Skylar later recalled. "I was scared. I didn't know what to do."
As the intruder fired his gun, he called out the name of a particular student; the youngster quite sensibly fled the building. Other kids "were just running everywhere and crying and hiding," Skylar recounted. Some of the panicking school kids probably attempted to call or text their parents to describe the horror unfolding in front of them. They didn't know that each of the parents had been instructed not to answer if his child issued a desperate plea for help.
That last sadistic touch is what distinguished the May 13 "active shooter drill" in Orangeville from countless other performances of its kind staged in schools across the Soyuz by the Police State Play Actors' Guild. Most of the time, the kids for whose supposed benefit those drills are choreographed -- and the parents responsible for their care, education, and upbringing -- are let in on the joke.
Last October 10, for example, a mob of "between 80 and 100 officials" from law enforcement agencies staged a little Garrison State melodrama in New York's William H. Barton Intermediate School. As described in the Glens Falls Post-Star:
"Fire alarms sounded at 9:31 a.m., drawing closed doors. Three Warren County sheriff's officers and two state troopers conducted the first search, where they encountered students in a hallway and instructed them to sit down. They reached a second floor on a north wing of the school and found several bodies laying across the hallway. Police searched the classrooms, bathrooms and even an elevator, pressing their backs against walls before entering rooms and calling out `clear.' A cafeteria was secured as a transfer point for victims with casualties, and a triage site for patient evaluation was at a nearby school."
In that exercise, students -- some of them in grade school -- were recruited to play "victims." One of them was the third-grade daughter of Heather Holl, who was herself cast as a "victim" in the third trimester of pregnancy. Another bit player, Heather's son Alexander, "played the role of a gunshot victim" with an entry wound in his chest and a large exit wound in the back.
It should be pointed out that the tactics employed in the "active shooter" scenario at the William H. Barton School focused on officer safety, rather than active intervention on behalf of the victims. In real life, Alexander Holl would have been one of several unarmed, helpless schoolchildren killed while the SWAT team -- encased in body armor and brandishing high-performance weaponry -- took exquisite care to minimize its exposure to risk.
"He's excited," Heather commented as her son was transported away from the scene by medical personnel. "He didn't even sleep last night."
It least he was given a copy of the script before the staged shooting began. The students who were deprived of that indispensable intelligence in Orangeville most likely aren't sleeping well now -- not because they're full of eager anticipation, but rather because they suffer from post-traumatic stress.
Parents were required to participate passively in the scenario played out in Orangeville: They weren't informed about the event until curtain time, and then ordered to participate in an information embargo targeting their terrified kids.
What this means, of course, is that although the disguised deputy playing the role of assailant was firing blanks, the school kids were, quite literally, being held hostage.
If a bank robber bluffs his way through a heist with a toy gun, he's committed a real crime. The same is true of the people who terrorized the inmates of Orangeville Jr.-Sr. High on May 13. School District Superintendent Randy Otto has submitted his resignation, and some parents have discussed the possibility of a lawsuit -- but the appropriate criminal charges against those responsible aren't forthcoming.
"Our number one goal is to save lives," warbled Leigh Anne Ryals, Emergency Management Director for Baldwin County, Alabama, following a similar school shooter drill in Robertsdale's Central Baldwin Middle School a few years ago. The means such drills employ are incompatible with that goal, since the standard template is based on the "Lockdown" Scenario: The killers conduct the rampage on their own terms, end it at a time of their choosing, and the SWAT team merely cattle-pens the victims.
Like every other "security" measure inflicted on Americans since 9/11, the "lockdown" scenario treats schoolchildren as a tactical impediment -- or perhaps even a threat -- to be dealt with, rather than as innocent people to be protected. That model was actually put in place before 9/11 -- even before Columbine - as part of the federal "Safe Schools" dogma that grew out of the ["War on Drugs"].
Today it is typical for police agencies to deploy "Resource Officers" to prowl the halls of schools in search of misbehavior that can be treated as criminal offenses, rather than disciplinary problems.
In his keynote address to the 2007 National Association of School Resources Conference, held against the rugged and forbidding backdrop of Orlando's Disney World, self-styled tactical and counter-terrorism John Giduck offered a telling glimpse into the mindset of the armed strangers who haunt local government schools:
"You've got to be a one-man fighting force.... You've got to have enough guns, and ammunition and body armor to stay alive.... You should be walking around in schools every day in complete tactical equipment, with semi-automatic weapons.... You can no longer afford to think of yourselves as peace officers.... You must think of yourself [sic] as soldiers in a war because we're going to ask you to act like soldiers." (Emphasis added.)
In her immensely informative and tirelessly infuriating new book Lockdown High: When The Schoolhouse becomes a Jailhouse, investigative reporter Annette Fuentes describes Giduck's audience as " a sea of khaki uniforms, some [of whom in the crowd] were w[e]aring holstered handguns.... [M]ore than a few had shaved heads and bulging bellies or biceps. Some had both. If drug tests had been required for registration, odds are that a few steroid-positives could have resulted among the more muscular attendees."
Giduck has appointed himself an authority on the tactics and training of special forces despite a resume untainted by actual experience in the same. In similar fashion Giduck advertises himself as a world-caliber authority on radical Islam and counter-terrorism: He claims to have been tutored in counter-terrorism by "Putin's boss," the former head of the KGB, and to have trained with Soviet-era special forces, during a visit to Russia in the late Gorbachev era. Assuming that Giduck is telling the truth, that line on his vita should summarily disqualify him from having anything to do with children anywhere.
Whatever proves to be the truth about Giduck's claims, he is a prominent figure among the cohort Fuentes calls the "Profiteers of Lockdown High" -- an interlocking collection of governmental and quasi-private bureaucracies committed to eradicating the few substantive distinctions separating schools from prisons.
"Every day in communities across the United States, children and adolescents spend the majority of their waking hours in schools that increasingly have come to resemble places of detention more than places of learning," observes Fuentes. Federally subsidized "zero tolerance" policies have created what Fuentes and other critics of the system call the "school-to-prison pipeline": "If yesterday's prank got a slap on the wrist, today those wrists could be slapped with handcuffs."
The danger here is not merely that schools have been largely transformed into short-term prison facilities; it's that the SROs deployed therein take seriously Giduck's catechism about being combat-ready "warriors," rather than peace officers. Their operational credo is not "protect and serve," but rather "control and dominate" -- and, with increasing frequency, "close and kill."
[Truncated for content and length]
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