Clearing Away the Rubble…with Black Hawks, Tanks, and Loads of Ammo

American Thinker

“We  have cleared away the rubble of crisis,” President Obama reported in his State  of the Union address, “and we can say with renewed confidence that the State of  our Union is stronger.”  He cited troops coming home after a decade of  “grinding war,” six million jobs created “after years of grueling recession,” American car purchases up, foreign oil  purchases down, a healing housing market, a rebounding stock market, corporate  profits that “have skyrocketed to all-time highs,” Republicans and Democrats  working together “to reduce the deficit by more than $2.5 trillion,” “tens of  thousands” of American jobs created by green energy, and a boom in natural gas  production that’s lowering our energy bills.

If  things are so peachy, I have a question for the president.  What’s with the  Black Hawk helicopters and urban warfare drills?

The  Army took over an empty high school in southeast Houston without warning last  month in a Department of Defense drill.  Terrified residents mistook blank  fire for live rounds.  At a City Council  meeting the next day, Mayor Annise  Parker decried “a shocking lack of sensitivity to community concerns” that  caught even some in the police department by surprise.  About the same time  council members were meeting in Houston, “federal law enforcement” agents were  rappelling down ropes from military helicopters hovering over the Capitol in Harrisburg,  Pennsylvania.

Days  earlier in Miami, one local news station reported that blanks fired from Black  Hawks soaring low over downtown were “pinging  off the high rises[,]” and another reported troops “rappelling  from the military choppers onto the Metrorail station platform.”  The  official explanation: “The training is designed to ensure that military  personnel are able to operate in urban areas and to focus on preparations for  overseas deployment.  It also serves as a mandatory training  certification.”  If true, why so many exercises now, when more troops are  scheduled to come home than be deployed?  And why are so many of them, like  one in Los Angeles last January, team exercises with local law  enforcement?  A reader claiming to be a former Marine commented on the CBS  Los Angeles news website that he was an infantryman for 20 years and never  trained in any city or town with civilians present.  Others are skeptical  as well.

John  Wayne Tucker, blogging at theboldpursuit.com,  has posted links to local reports of similar exercises that have taken place in  at least 14 cities, most of them over the last twelve months.  One in his  hometown of St. Louis last summer involved tanks rolling through neighborhoods  in what local news reported was a military “driver’s  ed of sorts.”  Tucker calls for citizens to demand an explanation from  their representatives.

 

While  we’re at it, can we get an explanation that makes sense for the nearly 2 billion  rounds of ammunition the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies have  been purchasing?  The AP has reported that it’s nothing more sinister than  bulk buying to get a discount; however, Investor Business Daily‘s Andrew  Malcolm wrote that experts have calculated that it’s enough ammo to arm DHS  “for a 24-year Iraq war,” which, he remarked, “is especially strange given  Obama’s double-barreled emphasis in his inaugural address on the approaching end  in Afghanistan ‘of a decade of war.'”

 

After  reading Malcolm’s article on air last Friday, radio host Mark Levin dismissed  internet chatter about the DHS preparing for domestic insurrection.  He  thinks it more likely that the government’s preparing for a catastrophe of their  own making: “the collapse of our financial system, the collapse of our society,  and the potential for widespread violence” in the streets that accompanies such  crises.

 

That  would certainly explain the Black Hawks as well.  It’s clear from his  inaugural and SOTU addresses that Obama intends to double down on government  spending, taxes, regulations, executive  orders, collectivism, and unchecked immigration with no budget proposals  or plan for reducing our national debt in sight.  He’s determined to  accelerate America forward Thelma  and Louise-like into the canyon of fundamental transformation, and both  local law enforcement and the military will need to be ready at the scene when  it all comes crashing down.

 

A  domestic crisis would also justify the billions of dollars in military surplus  the DOD has been gifting to local governments through its Law Enforcement  Support Office (LESO).  Chicago Channel 7’s I-Team  has been investigating “weapons of war” that are “ending up in Chicago and the  suburbs.”  Law enforcement is being so broadly defined that M-16 rifles and  a humvee went to a Catholic university, and an “arsenal of combat rifles” went  to Brookfield zoo.  What sense does it make to arm a zoo unless someone  envisions a scenario where desperate, starving urbanites are forced to turn it  into a hunting ground after grocery shelves run empty?

 

I’ve  lived in this country my entire life and never heard of government agencies  stockpiling millions of rounds of the hollow-point “training  ammo” listed in its solicitations or shooting blanks from military aircraft  over our neighborhoods and cities.  Not until now.  None of this makes  sense if things are as peachy as the president claims, and I think these  circumstances raise enough questions to warrant a congressional hearing.   Questions like these would not be remiss:

 

• Is  the      government preparing for the possible collapse of our economy and  society,      and why is the Obama administration continuing policies even the  General      Accounting Office says are unsustainable  if that’s the case?

 

• What      is the added value of blanks to these urban warfare exercises?  Are  they being used to desensitize  members of our military to firing on their fellow citizens if there’s domestic      turmoil?

 

• Why      are DHS and other federal agencies seeking so much of the more expensive      and lethal hollow-point bullets, which are not typically used at the       firing range and are outlawed  by the Geneva Convention for battlefield use?

 

• Are      bulk ammunition purchases and LESO’s redistribution of military hardware      to local governments connected to any domestic scenarios being played  out?

 

• If  the      purpose of these exercises includes preparing for operations overseas,      then why were Black Hawks recently firing over Miami but not  Benghazi?

 

It  amazes me that residents of areas where these exercises are taking place aren’t  flooding their representatives with questions and complaints.  Then again,  city dwellers tend to be more liberal, and I don’t have the faith in this  president and our policymakers in Washington that millions of people like  Houston resident Glen DeWitt do.  “If it’s to protect our kids, I’m for  it,” DeWitt told a reporter interviewing him about the DOD drill at the  school.  “I think it’s cool,” a bystander in Worcester, Mass., said of  helicopters “buzzing neighborhoods” and landing around the auditorium in Lincoln  Square last August.  “At least the empty buildings in Worcester are getting  some use,” he told a reporter from the Telegram &  Gazette.

 

Not  all residents are happy, however, nor are the many people posting comments on  websites and under YouTube videos of  these drills.  Alarmed Worcester resident Chad Julian left a message on the Telegram‘s Facebook page that ends with the question, “Don’t you think  it would help put the public’s mind at ease to know that there was a reasonable  explanation for all this hubbub especially since it was ONLY a training  exercise?”

 

Many  of us who can’t yet see through the “rubble of crisis” the president claims to  have cleared away would like a reasonable explanation for the hubbub as  well.

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