-Caveat Lector-
And then came The Oklahoma City Bombing. Government murder of 169 people and
injuring 700 more. When's the next "trial balloon." Y2K anyone? Gavin
<< America: A Stinking Police State!
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Thu, 23 Sep 1999 09:16:49 EDT
<A HREF="http://www.newsmax.com/articles/?a=1999/9/22/85323">remember the
Move</A>
The Waco Before Waco
Richard Poe
September 22, 1999
With the exception of Geraldo Rivera, most Americans seem to have grasped,
by
now, that responsibility for the Waco massacre goes all the way to the top.
Even so, we cannot pin the blame solely on Bill and Hillary.
The militarization of U.S. policing has proceeded unchecked through
Republican and Democratic administrations alike. Indeed, one of the earliest
Waco-like incidents occurred on May 13, 1985, long before Bill Clinton was
even a blip on the political radar screen.
That day, police emptied 10,000 rounds of ammunition into a house in West
Philadelphia, in a ninety-minute period. They fired Uzis, shotguns, M-16s,
..50-caliber machineguns, Browning semiautomatic rifles and M-60
machineguns.
A 20mm antitank gun was also on hand, though police claim they never fired
it.
Later that day, a canvas satchel containing four and a half pounds of C-4
plastic explosive was dropped on the house by helicopter. The ensuing fire
consumed not only that house, but sixty others, leaving the neighborhood a
smoking ruin.
At whom was all this firepower aimed? The targets were four men, three women
and six children — members of an anti-government, urban survivalist cult
called MOVE. Police say the cultists shot first, after lawmen tried to
arrest
four of them.
But Police Commissioner Gregore Sambor inadvertently cast doubt on this
claim
when he testified that the first shots came from automatic weapons. MOVE had
no such weapons — only two shotguns, two pistols and one .22-caliber rifle..
In any case, all MOVE members in the house were killed that day, except for
one woman and one 13-year-old boy.
Back in 1986, I attended the trial of Ramona Africa — the lone adult
survivor
of the MOVE house — and wrote a cover story about the massacre for the East
Village Eye. In that article, I suggested that the scorched-earth tactics
used against MOVE were a trial balloon, designed to test public reaction to
a
new style of ultra-violent policing.
My theory rested partly on the fact that federal agencies had encouraged and
facilitated the MOVE massacre behind the scenes. The FBI, for instance,
provided C-4, a military explosive forbidden to civilian police. The Bureau
of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms provided permission and tax waivers for
other military weapons.
Most curious, however, were the "reforms” enacted in the massacre’s wake..
Arguing that the slaughter had resulted from random bungling by overzealous
cops, Mayor W. Wilson Goode announced a sweeping reorganization supposedly
aimed at increasing the professionalism of Philadelphia police.
Goode’s proposals ranged from the creation of an elite counter-terrorist
strike force, to the establishment of unprecedented liaisons with federal
law
enforcement agencies, to training for police at military facilities, and
even
to anti-terrorist schools and "crisis management” training for city
officials
by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
In short, Goode called for more of the very same medicine that had caused
the
problem in the first place: outside meddling from federal goons.
Years later, in 1993, federal "crisis management” once again made headlines,
this time in Waco, Texas. Parallels between the MOVE and Waco massacres read
like guidelines drawn from the same tactical handbook.
In both cases, last-minute offers to negotiate were ignored by lawmen. In
both cases, fires were deliberately allowed to burn out of control. Both at
Waco and at the MOVE house, people trying to escape the flames were forced
back inside by gunfire.
Even more startling, lawmen in both cases claimed that the cultists had set
fire to themselves. In the midst of a civil suit brought by MOVE survivors
and relatives, Lt. Frank Powell suddenly anounced that the fire had been
deliberately set by MOVE members, not by the bomb he dropped.
"They chose their own end," Powell told reporters on May 1, 1996. MOVE
members had doused the roof with flammable liquid, then torched it, Powell
said.
His claim — which contradicted the findings of the city Fire Marshal and the
mayor’s MOVE Commission — evidently did not impress the jury, which awarded
Ramona Africa and relatives of two other MOVE victims $1.5 million in
damages.
If the MOVE bombing really was a trial balloon, it was evidently a
successful
one. The media accepted the story of bungling, overzealous cops. Public
outrage was confined to ineffectual liberal handwringing, much of it
centered
around the irrelevant fact that the MOVE victims were black.
Is Waco another trial balloon? Have the feds upped the ante this time, with
a
blatant use of Delta Force commandos, a higher body count, and a "whiter”
list of victims (about half the Waco dead were Anglo, the other half mostly
black, with some Mexicans and Asians)?
Very likely. If we fail to challenge this latest atrocity, even ghastlier
Wacos may lie ahead.
>>
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