Tag: Trump creating a Stasi-like secret police

The dubious deployment of armed enforcers within the U.S. is central to Trump’s politics

Washington Post logoThere are constant protests in New York City.

Meaning daily. It’s a city of millions, including a large number of activists and activist organizations. There are labor protests, antiwar protests, protests focused on foreign policy, protests aimed at arcane legal changes, demonstrations about housing laws, demonstrations leveraging whatever happens to be in the news. At times those protests are massive, a coalescing of activism around a common theme, as they were following the death of George Floyd earlier this year after a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck. But even when the protests don’t involve tens of thousands of people, they exist as an undercurrent.

For several days, the protests in May and June over Floyd’s death spiraled into something else. As happened in other places in the same period, groups of looters and vandals used the protests as a jumping-off point for theft and property damage. That quickly faded. When the protests shifted to focus attention on tributes to leaders of the former Confederacy and those who had participated in the slave trade, New York — not exactly a hotbed of Confederate nostalgia — was not an epicenter. City leaders did agree to remove a statue of Theodore Roosevelt from outside a museum, but that was more because of the presentation of the statue itself than anger at Roosevelt specifically. Continue reading.

Portland’s disturbing events show why federal law enforcement must not be allowed to ‘morph into’ a ‘Stasi-like’ secret police

AlterNet logoThe images coming out of Portland, Oregon in recent days have been disturbing: federal law enforcement agents, wearing military fatigues and driving unmarked vehicles, have detained nonviolent George Floyd protesters — and Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon has described the agents as President Donald “Trump’s secret police.” Much of the criticism of the agents has come from liberal and progressive website, but some conservative outlets are troubled as well, including The Bulwark. And in an article published in The Bulwark on July 20, Carrie Cordero — an intel/security specialist and former attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice — explains why having a “purely domestic security service” in the United States is a terrible idea.

“This past week, (Department of Homeland Security) personnel, including officers of the Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), were deployed by the acting secretary of Homeland Security to conduct domestic law enforcement activities in Portland,” Cordero notes. “But policing protest activity, in particular, requires a special sensitivity to and protection of constitutional rights. And the reports out of Portland indicate that DHS has provided an uncontrolled and over-militarized response. Moreover, these assignments of federal officers to control domestic unrest may be part of a broader slide toward a federal domestic security expansion that has neither been announced nor vetted either by the citizenry, the Congress, or the courts.” Continue reading “Portland’s disturbing events show why federal law enforcement must not be allowed to ‘morph into’ a ‘Stasi-like’ secret police”