This article appears in the June 19, 2020 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
Bush, Obama, the ADL, and the Militarization of U.S. Police Forces
[Print version of this article]
June 12—There is much more to the riotous scenes of cities going up in flames across America the weekend of June 5 than just the righteous display of grief and anger at the killing of another unarmed black man at the hands of local police. For years, especially since the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, an operation has been building in America, to transform the traditional role of local police departments and to impose a militarization of police forces nationwide, to unify the intent of the multitude of municipal police forces across the country into a force equivalent to that of an imperial “occupying power” (think of the U.S. Army in Iraq, or Afghanistan—only now on American soil).
This transformation has its origins in the years following George H.W. Bush’s 1990-1991 Gulf War. The process escalated in the wake of 9/11 and continued under the 16 years of the George W. Bush and Obama administrations. At the same time, these developments have been used to organize the opposition in what amounts to a gang/countergang operation intended to turn American cities into war zones.
Police forces are, by design, supposed to be local operations, with local communities policing themselves,—many cities even requiring, by law, that police (like fire and education) departments be staffed solely with residents of that community, with the idea to prevent the officers from becoming essentially a force of hired mercenaries, armed with an official badge sanctioning their activities. The intention is to be “keepers of the peace,” not to act as an occupying force.
There are two aspects of the post-9/11 transformation of traditional local policing into something entirely different to be considered here,—one being the “hardware,” and the second what might be thought of as “software”—the re-programming and conditioning of the officers themselves into becoming Gestapo-like enforcers.
Hardware
On the hardware side of things we have the federal 1033 Program, officially certified in 1997, but with precedents dating back to 1990, by which U.S. police forces have been effectively armed to the teeth—for free—with “surplus” military-grade gear equivalent to that of an invading army, on a par with the U.S. military invading forces that later invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. This is the legacy of George Herbert Walker Bush, arguably one of the worst Presidents this country ever had, who sought to militarize America’s streets in the 1990s to cover for his own culpability in creating the crack-cocaine epidemic and its ensuing crime wave.
Through the 1033 Program, now codified as the Law Enforcement Support Office (LESO), the Defense Logistics Agency is estimated to have distributed more than several billions of dollars worth of military-grade equipment to a minimum of 8,600 municipal police departments across the country, according to a 2014 exposé by Newsweek magazine.
Not only has this federal program of giveaways looked more and more attractive to cities as local budgets were stretched thinner and thinner—especially since the 2008 “Great Recession” collapse—but the LESO program itself was very lax at oversight, as a 2017 investigation by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) detailed in Stars and Stripes of June 8, 2017 was to prove. Stars and Stripes is a publication of U.S. armed forces news. Having set up a fake municipal recipient agency, the GAO investigators were able to procure over a million dollars worth of hardware within just the first week of their “sting” operation. Faux municipal representatives were given unsupervised clearance to “shop” through the LESO warehouses and choose whatever “anti-terror” equipment they desired. Someone clearly wanted this equipment on America’s streets.
While there is no official accounting of the LESO office available to the general public, since the government conveniently cloaks the identity of recipients (for “security” reasons), recording them only by county, a Nov. 13, 2017 NBC exposé estimated that, since its creation, the LESO program had, as of that year, distributed a minimum of $5.4 billion of hardware. The figure today likely approaches $10 billion.
However, the mere presence of, and access to high-grade military hardware does not, by itself, transform millions of sworn peace enforcers into lethal “occupiers” of our nation’s cities, essentially as “domestic terrorists.” For that, something additional, even sinister, is needed. This second aspect, the “software” side of conditioning, brings us face to face with our former and would-be future imperial oppressors, the British monarchy, through their agents—the state of Israel and the allied American Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith (ADL).
Software
In January 2002, while the nation was still reeling from the September 11 terror attacks just months earlier, and the newly-created (and misnamed) “Homeland Security” Department was crawling about with the implicit notion that everyone, both foreign and domestic, was a potential terrorist, the state of Israel offered to share its vast expertise in this area by initiating, in cooperation with the ADL, the National Counter-Terror Seminar (NCTS), to be held in Israel, open to any and all law enforcement officials from the federal, down to the municipal level.
Like-minded groups in the U.S., including the giant American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the American Jewish Committee’s Project Interchange and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), quickly jumped on board to provide financing for travel and lodging, making it possible for even the smallest cities and towns to “benefit” from the knowledge of this nest of imperialists.
As the ADL itself described the NCTS program (in a singular, undated public acknowledgement of its very existence):
Every year, American law enforcement executives travel to Israel with ADL to study first hand Israel’s tactics and strategies to combat terrorism. The National Counter-Terrorism Seminar (NCTS) is an intensive week long course led by senior commanders in the Israel National Police, experts from Israel’s intelligence and security services, and the Israel Defense Forces. More than 175 law enforcement executives have participated in 12 NCTS sessions since 2004, taking the lessons they learned in Israel back to the United States.
In the wake of the 2015 death of Freddy Gray in Baltimore, Amnesty International issued a report on this arrangement by which American law enforcement personnel were being trained in a foreign country, specifically one with a notorious legacy as a violator of human rights. Amnesty International reported, “These trainings put Baltimore police and other U.S. law enforcement employees in the hands of military, security and police systems that have racked up documented human rights violations for years.” The report also noted that “even the U.S. State Department” had documented dozens of cases in which “Israeli police [had carried out] extrajudicial executions and other unlawful killings,” with additional instances of “excessive use of force against peaceful protesters,” including torture.
It must here be noted that while the ADL maintains a squeaky-clean public image as a non-governmental “civil rights” organization dedicated to “fighting anti-Semitism,” the group has a proven track record (for anyone who cares to investigate) of creating discrimination cases in order to quash them—similar in that respect to another organization it often partners with in these operations, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
As for the numbers offered by the ADL, they are pitifully low. While no official figures are available, believable estimates run as high as 100,000 American police officers who have been flown, often free of charge, to Israel for the week-long indoctrination sessions hosted by Israel’s federalized police force and the Israeli army. Since its inception, in addition to the Israeli seminars, the NCTS series has now expanded to U.S. soil, where Israeli intelligence officers directly update attendees on the latest “anti-terror” intelligence—essentially a “refresher course.” Reported “graduates” of these conditioning seminars include an acting Deputy Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE); former Chief of Police in Washington, D.C., Cathy Lanier (now heading “security” for the NFL); and police department leaders from at least a dozen states from Maine to California.
‘Domestic Terrorists’ in the Form of Police
All this “conditioning” finally came to a head in Ferguson, Missouri on August 9, 2014, when an officer of the Ferguson Police Force—a division of the greater St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department—shot and killed an unarmed young black man in broad daylight. While it is not known whether the specific officer involved was a “graduate” of the Israeli NCTS program, it quickly came to light that the police chief for St. Louis, Tim Fitch, definitely was. An article in Ebony magazine on August 19 began, “The St. Louis County Police Department that killed Michael Brown and initially placed Ferguson on siege has trained with the Israeli military.” Citing a 2011 article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the magazine noted that, “County Police Chief Timothy Fitch was one of 15 American officials to participate in a week-long training in Israel three years ago.”
With the killing of Michael Brown, and the subsequent declaration of a state of emergency by the governor, shocked Americans got their first glimpse of the destruction which a militarized police department— militarized by the U.S. Department of Defense’s LESO program—was capable. Several observers reported that U.S. police forces changed, and were no longer treating minorities as equals under the law, but, rather acting to treat minorities as a lesser people suitable only of being “contained,” in a manner identical to Israel’s approach to Palestinians on the West Bank.
President Barack Obama attempted to deflect criticism by belatedly announcing limitations on the federal hardware LESO program saying, “We’ve seen how militarized gear sometimes gives people a feeling like they are an occupying force as opposed to a part of the community there to protect them,” but the hypocrisy of Obama’s statement was exposed by Glenn Ford in the Black Agenda Report of July 28, 2016, headlined “Obama Prepares to Reinforce the Militarized Police Occupation of Black America,” citing a report documenting that, between 2010 and 2014, Obama oversaw a 2,400% (24 times) increase in the distribution of federal hardware to municipalities. Ford called Obama “the biggest domestic war hawk in the history of the United States.”
In 2015, just days before the anniversary of the Ferguson shooting, the ADL issued a rare “award” to the by-then former St. Louis Police Chief Fitch, further rubbing salt in still-fresh wounds and adding to the strength of this narrative. The ADL webpage announcing the dinner to honor Fitch, ostensibly in recognition for his having established a “Holocaust education program” for police officers, has been removed.
Beyond George Floyd
Since the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, May 25, 2020, numerous articles have brought to light that the “knee on the neck” technique that killed him is one unique to the Israeli Defense Forces. Yet, as exposure of the Pentagon’s Law Enforcement Supply Office and the supply of military-grade hardware for use in “policing” U.S. citizens has quickly led to action on the federal level, hardly a voice has been raised in opposition to the far more sinister program of training our police officers to be thugs in service of an imperial New World Order.
While there are a few isolated instances of municipalities having been shamed into halting the participation of their officers in the NCTS, only the lone city of Durham, North Carolina can be congratulated for having codified it into law: The town council voted unanimously against it. Reported in the Middle East Monitor, the June 9 headline read, “U.S. city bans brutal Israeli military training of police forces.” It was also reported in Stars and Stripes.
To understand the truly satanic nature of the British, however, and the British role in this, one has to peel away the next layer, to see how this has created the conditions for social chaos. In classic “gang/countergang” fashion, in the wake of the 2014 death of Michael Brown, the newly-founded Black Lives Matter (BLM) was quickly showered with cash, led first by a $30 million grant from British operative, billionaire George Soros, famous for his funding of “color revolutions” against sovereign governments worldwide, followed by another $100 million from the Ford Foundation, itself well-known as a front for CIA operations during the 1950s and 60s.
The current alleged solution put forward by BLM and its allies—to “defund” the police—is a fraudulent demand that would unleash lawlessness across the nation, particularly victimizing the inhabitants of urban areas. An actual solution lies in returning local police to what they were conceived to be: “keepers of the peace.” What should be “defunded,” is the Pentagon’s LESO program, which arms them as if going into battle with a foreign invading force, leading them to view their own neighbors as the enemy. That should happen immediately.
At the same time, no more should American police officers be sent to a foreign country, Israel, for training, or in any way should they be accepting its influence. Beyond that, the “cure” will only come from realizing that, especially since the onset of the coronavirus lockdowns, the entire nation is suffering, and solutions must address that larger picture where the issue of economic policy becomes paramount.
In that light, what quickly needs to be “defunded” is Wall Street, with its looting, casino economy—by enforcing bank separation through implementation of a newly-legislated Glass-Steagall Act (which one would expect President Trump to gladly sign into law), and reforming the Federal Reserve into a National Bank, capable of funding trillions of dollars of job-creating infrastructure investments. The nation needs to turn its eyes back to the stars—as they were with the SpaceX launch a mere two days before George Floyd’s death—with a commitment to build the NASA Gateway and related lunar infrastructure for colonizing the Solar System and beyond.
These and other ideas for recovery are spelled out in the LaRouche PAC’s program for creating 1.5 billion new, productive jobs rebuilding the world, and LaRouche’s Four Laws program. Only in this way can we defeat this scourge of pessimism.
