Drug War Issues
Dear Drug War Chronicle Reader:
The graphic to the left is from the web site of the Lima, Ohio, SWAT team. In January 2008, the team stormed the home of Tarika Wilson and Anthony Terry during an ordinary drug investigation. A member of the SWAT team shot and killed Wilson -- an unarmed 26-year old -- also blowing a finger off the one-year old son she was holding. Another member of the SWAT team killed two family dogs on a different floor. The police department removed the graphic from the web site following the incident. Wilson's killer was charged with two misdemeanors, acquitted, and continues to work for the Lima police department, though not for the SWAT team.
Created for emergency or very high-intensity situations (snipers, hostages and the like), today SWAT teams deploy more than 50,000 times per year, mostly in low-level drug raids. This is dangerous and wrong, as the killing of Wilson, the maiming of her child, and the image the SWAT team chose to represent itself before things went bad all demonstrate. Please watch our online video, "SWAT Raids -- No One Is Safe," please forward it to your friends, and if possible please post it on your web site. When you're done, please sign the "Petition for Responsible SWAT Reform" to limit SWAT raids to when they're truly needed.
Please consider donating to this effort, and thank you for helping to stop the "war on drugs."
Sincerely,
David Borden, Executive Director
StoptheDrugWar.org
Washington, DC
http://stopthedrugwar.org
Permission to Reprint: This content is licensed under a modified Creative Commons Attribution license. Content of a purely educational nature in Drug War Chronicle appear courtesy of DRCNet Foundation, unless otherwise noted.
Comments
War on Drugs
We have citizens committing murder in nations that have oil and other natural resources (now, it's Pakistan). We have citizens committing murder in the US, under the guise of protecting society from drug use (although the most deadly drugs are legal), we have instigators of the use of torture walking free and, indeed, living very well, thank you. We have people dying for lack of health care, workers and especially women exploited across the world on behalf of capitalist parasites.
Why would anyone want any of this? And what can be done about it? The US is apparently too large, too diverse, and has been under the heel of unfettered capitalism for too many generations for effective citizen revolt, People today don't even know how much their lives are diminished. Our food supply is a crime. In 1900, bread flour was 40% protein. After agribusiness got hold of it, abetted by government laws, it had been systematically degraded until, by 1980, it contained only 5% protein. Today? Who knows? In the depth of the Depression, my mother, wife of an iceman, could and did buy shoes that fi and supported the foott, i.e., a shoe with a AA vamp and a AAAA heel. Today, women don't even know what that means. Socks were sized like shoes, not ill-fitting sacks that bunch and wrinkle. Appliances could be repaired..at home. Packaging wasn't a threat to humanity via massive manufacture and disposal. Because enough people were hired to serve customers so that shoplifting wasn't a problem. People, rather than robots, assembled products, with screws, not welds. Planned obsolescence was embraced by capitalism in the 50's and 60's, and the planet has paid mightily ever since. And so it goes.
The two most destructive agents on earth are capitalism and religion. They account for nearly all the wars, all the degradation of the environment, the gross overpopulation of the planet, the intentional subjugation of half the population, the hunger and starvation plaguing so much of humanity, even here in the good ol' US of A.
Both agents are the constructs of male greed and ego, when you get right down to it. Nothing really changes. What's the answer? Testosterone blockers? I'd say we are doomed.
The truth is...
...treason in the state of lies...Ron Paul.Truth must be returned to it's patriotic state. or maybe we are "doomed".
Police Training
Why do they use SWAT teams? It seems they do it for police training... most of the time they could simply arrest the suspect as they leave the home, as they could have done with david koresh!
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