Paramilitary Assault Teams Terrorizing America

Former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under Reagan highlights disturbing use and abuse of SWAT teams that carry out over 40,000 raids a year on largely innocent and non-threatening people
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Former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration Paul Craig Roberts joined Alex Jones yesterday to talk about his latest article which highlights the militarization of American police and how SWAT teams are being used to terrorize recreational drug users and innocent people.

Roberts' article, The Empire Turns Its Guns on the Citizenry, cites a 2006 CATO report that warns against the out of control use and abuse of paramilitary police raids.

"There are now 17,000 local America police forces that are armed with rocket launchers, bazookas, heavy machine guns, all kinds of chemical sprays - in fact some of them have tanks, you have now local police departments that are equipped beyond the standard of American heavy infantry," said Roberts.

"In recent years there have been 40,000 or more callouts of SWAT teams annually - that would be 110 times a day - have you read about 110 hostage or terrorist events every day last year?"

Roberts said that SWAT teams are so prevalent yet expensive to maintain, that they are increasingly being used to handle benign situations that wouldn't cause one village cop any headaches, such as targeting recreational drug users who purchase small quantities of marijuana.

"They are serving routine warrants to people who pose no danger to the police or to the public," said Roberts.

"They break into homes and apartments in the middle of the night when people are asleep, they use stun grenades, cause all kinds of chaos and confusion and the result is a tremendous number of innocent people are murdered in their beds, brutalized, traumatized because the very high percentage of these cases the SWAT teams have wrong addresses, they get the wrong people."



Roberts said that SWAT teams were responsible for terrorizing the American people a hundred fold more than Muslim terrorists because they are being used so often.

Roberts said the source of information that most SWAT team raids were based on came from snitches, who are often drug dealers making a living as police informants in order to eliminate competition while avoiding arrest.

The State also doles out money based on the number of drug arrests made so in the majority of cases, the police are simply conducting unnecessary raids to meet funding targets.

"Then you get the police forces out hiring drug dealers to sell drugs to people and tell the police - and the drug dealers of course use this role to keep themselves from being arrested but they turn in all their competitors," said Roberts.

Roberts highlighted the fact that SWAT teams receive military hardware and training and because there are not enough hostage or other dangerous situations to keep them occupied they are being used to serve warrants on non-threatening individuals.

The ultimate goal of the paramilitary assault teams, many of whose numbers across the country will be boosted when troops arrive back from Iraq, is mass gun confiscation on the scale that we saw during Hurricane Katrina, where everyone from 80-year-old grandmothers to rich mansion owners in the dry areas had their weapons seized. Soldiers in Iraq have been trained to carry out door to door raids and have been utilized for this function thousands of times.

Alex Jones has attended numerous military urban warfare training drills across the U.S. where role players were used to simulate arresting American citizens, confiscating their weapons, and taking them to internment camps. Actors scream out that they have constitutional rights as they are handcuffed and hauled off to the detainment facility.