The Other Drone Question: Is Obama Building A Federal Police Force?

American Thinker ^ | Mar. 18, 2013 | Tara Servatius

[EXCH54FE]

Less than two weeks ago, Sen. Rand Paul's demanded to know whether the president believed he had a right to kill an American citizen on American soil with a drone, finally getting an answer that had to be dragged out Attorney General Eric Holder. An equally important, but still unasked question is whether the president intends to build a federal, drone-based "public safety" force to police local communities.

Somebody had better ask the president about this quickly, because it appears that his administration intends to use drones to actively usurp what were once local police and sheriff's department functions.

Put it all together, and it sure looks like Obama is building the backbone for that national police force he wanted the first time he ran for office.

Worse yet, both Democrats and Republicans are now openly discussing a plan to put all the drones flown in America's skies, including those owned and operated by local police departments, under the ultimate supervision of the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice, consolidating the country's surveillance and law enforcement powers under one powerful federal police jurisdiction.

According to Wired.com, DHS is now experimenting with how its drones can be used in "first responder, law enforcement and border security scenarios."

The DHS's drones could also be used, Nextgov.com reported, "to support emergency and non-emergency incidents nationwide" and to give the department "situational awareness" in public safety matters or disasters, including forest fires. The department also plans to use its drones, and their attached cameras to surveil and police sporting events, political events and large public gatherings.

The problem with DHS's plans is that many of the above functions used to be handled by local law enforcement without any help from the federal government.

[lentulusgracchus]

“Under Bush, the attorney general’s guidelines governing FBI operations were overhauled, allowing investigative tactics from the infamous COINTELPRO era, such as infiltrating constitutionally protected ideological groups — on the basis of a secret legal standard that has never been disclosed. And even though the CIA is prohibited from operating within the United States, it has smeared critics and trained local law enforcement in counterproductive profiling techniques.”

Your source sounds awfully Lefty .... knocking COINTELPRO ... "constitutionally protected ideological groups" = ones being run by KGB Active Measures .... "on the basis of a secret legal standard that has never been disclosed": How about NSA decrypts of KGB intercepts, naming names and groups and outlining plans to grow an Obama in the ranks of the New Mobe and the SDS?

And profiling sounds pretty damned good to me, when applied to fanatical-to-the-death raggies bent on mass murder. How about you? In the Philippines in 1903, we shot people like that out of hand. It worked. You want to get all mooshy on them, and link up with Kunstler's crowd to strap on Shrub and Big Dick?

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

That was then, but how about those techniques applied to conservatives? Remember that after Timothy McVeigh in ‘95, the feds openly classified lots of conservative movements right alongside terrorist groups, and 9-11 did not change that one bit.

At no point did W. Bush tell them that conservatives were no threat to the US. So much of the Patriot Act is used today to spy on conservatives.

[1010RD]

Is Obama building? GW Bush started it. Department of Homeland Security sounded like “Stasi” when I first heard it.

The same guys who can’t protect our borders and missed the 9/11 attack get even more power and authority?

[lentulusgracchus]

Concur. Bush did very little to defend us, and could barely be inconvenienced to break with the Republican Unity Coalition (actually the predecessor of GOProud) to support DOMA.

He's from Midland and has a great Texas wife. I don't know what his problem is with conservatives. His ma and pa and Yale faculty must have done a hell of a job convincing him that we are all Spawn of Satan, Kluxers in street clothes. (George Sr. has always hated, just hated, conservative Democrats for that reason -- they're all trailer-trash Kluxers to him.)

Now the Left wants to herd us into extermination camps, and the GOP-E looks on all this with cold eyes and holds Sarah Palin in contempt, one of the best women in American public life today, because she has a regional accent and has shot and cleaned big animals with her husband, whose children she bore for richer or poorer.