Your Influence Counts ... Use It! The SPOTLIGHT by Liberty Lobby

Reprinted from www.libertylobby.org, home of The SPOTLIGHT archive

SWAT Teams, BATF Getting More Leeway in Home Invasions With No Fear of Consequences

  • Americans cannot suffer police state terrorism in the name of "law enforcement" and still call themselves "free." They must decide between the "security" of the SWAT mentality and the personal responsibility of freedom, not only from criminality but, more, from government tyrants who no longer even consider police "peace officers."
By Tony Blizzard

It is becoming all too commonplace in America today. The shooting death of Carl Ray Wilson of rural Arkansas by "law enforcement" agents is best described as cold-blooded murder, officially covered up.

Once again, no participating officer or official will be held to account for an arbitrary killing, using military-tactic stealth to invade the sanctity of his home and destroy the peace of his sleeping family while shooting him to death before their eyes. A simple knock on the door and a warrant shown during regular business hours would have sufficed.

Timing these raids when the targeted family will be asleep practically guarantees there will be confrontation. Who does not attempt to defend himself when he awakens to armed strangers in black invading his home? It appears that these myrmidons well understand this reaction and purposely use it to justify the murder of "targets" in their beds.

Typically utilizing criminal appearing agents -- garbed in black and masked -- who neither show a warrant mor announce any reason to justify their prexence on one's property, these no-knock "SWAT" operations too often amount to brutal home-invasion killings with the earmarks of KGB or Mossad-style "hits." These assaults cannot be lawful in this nation no matter what congress and the kept courts say.

The whole "shoot first and ask questions later" SWAT mentality is foreign to our Bill of Rights and the concepts embodied in it. Several of those rights are routinely ignored in the process. Just a generation or so ago, reflecting our national sense of right order, there was a common saying that "100 guilty men must fo free rather than one innocent man be convicted."

The SWAT mentality doesn't concern itself with the niceties of a conviction or any other due process, just "getting its man." whether alive, maimed or dead is immaterial to them. In that mind set, he's already tried, found guilty and convicted, a criminal to be dealt with in a harsh, terroristic manner. That seems to go for any family members in the way also, even children.

Whatever happened to our lawful necessity of presumed innocence? SWAT and "no knock" are police state concepts for nations which have zero tolerance for justice and freedom. Rationalized as a "drug war" necessity, SWAT is mushrooming as the police action of choice in all areas of "peace keeping."

Mymidons recruited to carry out these bully-boy deeds -- supposedly the servants of those they enthusiastically attack -- to often show sadistic tendencies. They seem not to be overly interested in the certainty, even of the street address, of their planned "targets." The thrill of the hunt, or maybe of the kill, appears to be at least part of the SWAT mentality. They have callously victimized innocent families whose home were "fingered" at random by some prison con looking for a way to reduce his sentence.

When an innocent is murdered by them, or when they terrorized and degrade in every way an innocent family, it doesn't seem to bother their collective conscience enough even to offer an apology. The best officials have to offer tends to be taxpayer dollars that go to pay off the innocent victims in order to keep them quiet.

Rationalizations in talks to impressionable school kids about their great service to the public do not offset the brutality and terror some of their number obviously enjoy bringing into the lives of wives, children and other members of families they invade. Acts such as sadistically forcing wives and children, who had been violently rousted out in their bedclothes, to shiver on cold ground for hours while handcuffed, seems to be standard practice. As is the verbal degradation of any woman unfortunate enough to be rousted from her bed not fully clothed.

Agents in the Wilson killing were under the authority of the U.S. Treasury Department's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF), on of the more vicious of over 100 federal bureaucracies to which Congress has arbitrarily granted police state enforcement powers.

Carl Wilson had a criminal past but had paid his debt to society and was no longer considered anything but a family man to those who knew him well.

But lately the "guardians" of our society have decided that even if a man fully pays his debt, it won't be accepted. Most ex-felons are no longer returned to full citizenship, "law and order" perversion of justice that will, in their future, come to haunt many who consider themselves good citizens.

Besides losing their right to vote, felons, like so-called "dead beat dads," are having more and more natural rights withheld from them. For Wilson, one of those was the right to have a gun. It was this "violation" that a swarm enemy, BATF Agent Bill Buford -- who promised Wilson he would "get him," used to arrange the early morning raid on Wilson's family.

When aroused, Wilson made a belated attempt to arm and defend himself and his family (this is always the rationalization for a "law enforcement" killing even though there is absolutely no chance whatever for an individual so taken by surprise) but was shot seven times, mostly in the back and through a wall, and then gruffly ordered to "get up" which he couldn't do.

There, in his bed and in his wife's gun-to-her-head presence, the agents watched him bleed to death with no move to prevent it. One later even asked his wife why she was not int the bed with him, an implication that he wanted her to have suffered the same fate.

According to The Sierra Times reporters Wayne Hicks and Henrietta Bowman, immediately after the killing, Agent Buford began a series of lies about the circumstances from the motives for the raid to how the raid progressed, even to who fired the first shot -- now a commonplace method of operation for myrmidons. No government agent was concerned enough about an investigation to call the home a crime scene and rope it off or otherwise attempt to keep any evidence from being moved. At least they didn't burn or raze it as they did Waco and the Oklahoma City federal building.

These myrmidon "public servants" hold no grief for the public and consider themselves a class above, not beholden to, the rule of law they claim to enforce on others.

An interesting and sinister side bar surfaced by the Times reporters is a suspicion that Wilson had knowledge concerning the murders of the two boys found on the railroad tracks near Mena, Ark., during the CIA's dope-running Iran-contra days of Gov. Bill Clinton, Ollie North, Barry Seal, and others.