The War at Home
by digby
From the “if you build it, they will use it” files:
A 19-month-old boy is fighting for his life after a SWAT team threw a stun grenade into his crib during an overnight home raid, the toddler’s family says.
Police were looking for Wanis Thometheva, who sold methamphetamine to an undercover officer Tuesday evening, police said.
But when the team raided his Georgia home, the Phonesavanh family was inside — not Thometheva.
The horror of this is almost too much to bear. A poor little 19 year baby may die and will surely be severely impacted if he lives because an explosive device was thrown into his crib, next to his head. It’s hard to see how this could be seen as anything less than manslaughter.
But I think we have to ask ourselves why in the world the police felt it necessary to stage a military style raid on any home, much less fail to do the due diligence to find out who lived there, over a sale of illegal drugs. This wasn’t terrorism. It wasn’t a gang selling automatic weapons out of the back yard. It wasn’t the home of a suspected kidnapper holding someone for ransom. It wasn’t anything that one could construe as an immediate danger to the public requiring such aggressive military tactics. And yet, the police do this all over the country and they are constantly making mistakes, misidentifying the occupants or the residence, wounding and sometimes killing people.
Why do they do this? Because of the militarization of our police forces which are in the business of buying more and more military-style gear and assuming more and more military tactics and strategies. And inevitably, they have also assumed the posture of an occupying army.
I don’t suppose that Eisenhower saw this as one of the dangers of the Military Industrial Complex, but it is one. The government spends trillions on combat gear and military training somebody’s going to use it. There are only so many land wars they can get away with fighting. So police agencies are fighting the “war on drugs” here at home and the enemy is the American public.
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