one must ask, why does the US have enemies?
Yes, certainly America is solely to blame for anything bad that should ever happen to it, no matter what the response.
How about at least owning up to the shit we do that is bad?
Obama’s crackdown views leaks as aiding enemies of U.S.
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Re: Obama’s crackdown views leaks as aiding enemies of U.S.
#22one must ask, why does the US have enemies?
More over, why so many perceived enemies who are US citizens? Why is the US government treating its own citizens as enemies of the state? As a non American, I take a perverse sort of comfort from that idea that it looks like the US government is as scared of its own people as it is foreigners. At least we foreigners and American citizens are in it together. Truth is, we are enemies of US government behavior, not the…
> More over, why so many perceived enemies who are US citizens? Why is the US government treating its own citizens as enemies of the state?
My guess is because we are told that we live in a Democracy and our vote and our taxes going to aid and abetting the people that are responsible for massive amounts of random acts of violence all over the planet.
Re: Obama’s crackdown views leaks as aiding enemies of U.S.
#23That raises the question: who is US after all? Is it the officials or is it the people?
Re: Obama’s crackdown views leaks as aiding enemies of U.S.
#24Re: Obama’s crackdown views leaks as aiding enemies of U.S.
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is also an exceedingly rare crime. It would have been acceptable to let the robbers get away, and then catch them later (if at all). Our cities are not war zones (thankfully). To put it another way, this is no different from saying that the police should be armed with anti-aircraft missiles, because of the 9/11 attacks.
It's rare because police can handle it now. If you let head to toe kevlar robbers get away all the time, well, you'll have a lot of those types of attacks.
It was rare before SWAT, before the LAPD carried AR-15s in their patrol cars, and before it occurred. It is just a rare crime, even in a large city. I think the theory that there would be copycats is easily disproved: this was their third bank robbery, yet there were no copycats following the first two, nor following their successful armored truck robberies. Those crimes occurred over a period of several years, more than enough time for a copycat to get the guns and armor.
On the other hand, paramilitary police teams targeting the wrong house or killing innocent people happens with frequency. It happens every year. Even if only 1/1000th of the raids that occur each year were done in error, you would expect about 40 such mistakes to occur per year. SWAT teams do not need to hide their existence, they are rarely punished for attacking innocent people, and they exist even in small towns.
Re: Obama’s crackdown views leaks as aiding enemies of U.S.
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Incidents like this one don't help, where bank robbers wore full suits of body armor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Hollywood_shootout ... probably because they expected SWAT. It's a bit of an arms race, literally, between the cops and the robbers.
That is also an exceedingly rare crime. It would have been acceptable to let the robbers get away, and then catch them later (if at all). Our cities are not war zones (thankfully). To put it another way, this is no different from saying that the police should be armed with anti-aircraft missiles, because of the 9/11 attacks.
Nowadays, the police shotgun, with a maximum effect range of 100 yards shooting a slug that can be stopped by soft body armor, is largely being replaced by the much more versatile and accurate "police carbine", i.e. an AR-15. Only hard plates will stop the .233/5.56 NATO rounds those shoot, and they're way too heavy to do more than protect some of your torso.
The Hollywood Shootout, as the link notes, had "Several officers also appropriated AR-15 rifles from a nearby firearms dealer." and mentions how this incident propelled the move to patrol carbines.
(Given how obnoxious they were afterwords about returning them, the gun dealer should have insisted they come back after the normally mandatory 2 week waiting period....)
Re: Obama’s crackdown views leaks as aiding enemies of U.S.
#27That raises the question: who is US after all? Is it the officials or is it the people?
If there isn't a significant change in the country's direction within the next few years, say, perhaps by the end of the decade or a little after, we'll know the answer is cemented as the former.
Re: Obama’s crackdown views leaks as aiding enemies of U.S.
#28This was common in Eastern Europe and USSR during the purges - they were "Enemies with a Party Ticket".
It is disturbing how easily this rhetoric comes.
Re: Obama’s crackdown views leaks as aiding enemies of U.S.
#29one must ask, why does the US have enemies?
Because its government thinks having an enemy or several is the way to mobilize the population.
It unifies people toward a common aim: e.g., beating the "evil empire" (to steal Reagan's label for the Soviet Union), whoever that is chosen to be, by the US government.
It's amusing to watch the US government's selection of "evil empire" as it suits their interests. They will never declare all countries that commit "atrocities" (and there are many) as the evil empires. They will instead carefully select the ones who are not cooperating with the US government to a degree the US government deems satisfactory.
Those countries who defy the bequests of Washington are labelled "evil" and, sadly, a large percetange American population becomes unified against them. Not only the "evil" foreign government, but also to some extent the foreign country as a whole, including its people.
Of course the foreign government turn around and tells its people to distrust the US, and a large percentage listen, and in my humble opinion we're all worse off for it. Because as someone said it another comment on another Snowden article, people of different countries, aside from governments and propaganda, are generally curious about one another, and friendly.
Re: Obama’s crackdown views leaks as aiding enemies of U.S.
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have a source for this?
http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/insidestoryamericas/2012... http://cironline.org/reports/local-police-stockpile-high-tec... http://www.aclu.org/militarization http://stream.aljazeera.com/story/growing-militarisation-pol... http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/04/sunday-review/have-america... http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/nov/... http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/09/12/police-milit... h…
Never forget Radley Balko on this topic, and he's got a new book out, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces (http://www.amazon.com/Rise-Warrior-Cop-Militarization-Americ...) as well as an old, hard/$$$ to find one, *Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America (http://www.amazon.com/Overkill-Paramilitary-Police-Raids-Ame...).
Makes for very depressing reading.