After Trump deploys secret police in Portland, 'imagine what happens if he gets four more years'

"They want to see what they can get away with before launching into other parts of the country."

by Jake Johnson

Video footage and first-hand accounts of unidentified federal law enforcement officials snatching up Black Lives Matter protesters in Portland, Oregon and throwing them into unmarked vehicles drew nationwide attention and outrage Friday, with members of Congress, human rights groups, and journalists accusing the Trump administration of deploying "secret police" to crush dissent.

"Unmarked federal agents in combat gear are pulling protesters off the street and jailing them without charge," tweeted Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). "That is what a police state is all about. Now is the time to defend our Constitution. Now is the time to come together and defeat Trump's authoritarian policies."

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) called the conduct of federal law enforcement "outrageous" and said the Trump administration "should not be using unidentified federal officers as a secret police force to terrorize U.S. citizens and violate their constitutional rights."

Federal law enforcement officials from the U.S. Marshals Service and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have reportedly been patrolling downtown Portland in unmarked vehicles and detaining demonstrators without explanation since at least July 14 as protests sparked by the police killing of George Floyd continue on a nightly basis across the city.

The Trump administration sent the federal officers to Portland to confront racial justice demonstrators earlier this month against the wishes of Oregon Gov. Kate Brown and Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler, both Democrats. In a Fox News interview Thursday night, Acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf denounced Oregon officials for demanding the withdrawal of federal officials, saying, "That's just not going to happen on my watch."

Journalists and demonstrators on the ground in Portland have documented numerous abuses by federal officials, including the indiscriminate firing of rubber bullets and tear gas into crowds of protesters and conducting arrests apparently without any semblance of probable cause. Over the weekend, a federal agent fractured a peaceful demonstrator's skull with an impact munition.

"This is terrifying and outrageous," tweeted Vanita Gupta, president an CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. "Secret police are the purview of authoritarians. Trump is doing this months away from the election because he thinks it helps him. But imagine what happens if he gets four more years."

Mark Pettibone, a 29-year-old Portland resident, told the Washington Post that he was detained, searched, and placed in a holding cell early Wednesday morning by men wearing military fatigues and no identifying information aside from "police" patches on their uniforms. The officers, according to Pettibone, drove an unmarked gray minivan.

"Pettibone said he still does not know who arrested him or whether what happened to him legally qualifies as an arrest," the Post reported. "The federal officers who snatched him off the street as he was walking home from a peaceful protest did not tell him why he had been detained or provide him any record of an arrest... As far as he knows, he has not been charged with any crimes."

The Nation's Jeet Heer wrote Friday that "on the face of it, what these federal officers are doing is illegal and unconstitutional."

"It's possible that they are acting under the 2011 National Defense Authorization Act, signed by Barack Obama, which legalized the detention of Americans suspected of being terrorists," Heer noted. "If so, then the War on Terrorism has truly come home."

Zakir Khan, a spokesperson for the Oregon chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), warned that the Trump administration may be using Portland as "a test case."

"They want to see what they can get away with before launching into other parts of the country," Khan told the Post.

Source, links:

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/07/17/after-trump-deploys-secret-police-portland-imagine-what-happens-if-he-gets-four-more

Related:

Trump's "brigades" are ready to start a civil war in case he loses November's election

Comments

GAME OVER, Trump: Putin, China & BRICS Just CRUSHED US Dollar

Danny Haiphong Donald Trump's war on BRICS is backfiring as the Russia & China-led Global South moves to dump the US dollar and build a new order independent of its dictates. Journalist and geopolitical analyst Ben Norton breaks it all down. Related: Trump's tariffs: A unique opportunity for BRICS and the Global South to fully escape from dollar tyranny

WikiLeaks reveals that literally every router in America has been compromised

The latest Wikileaks Vault7 release reveals details of the CIA’s alleged Cherry Blossom project, a scheme that uses wireless devices to access users’ internet activity. globinfo freexchange As cyber security expert John McAfee told to RT and Natasha Sweatte: Virtually, every router that's in use in the American home are accessible to hackers, to the CIA, that they can take over the control of the router, they can monitor all of the traffic, and worse, they can download malware into any device that is connected to that router. I personally, never connect to any Wi-Fi system, I use the LTE on my phone. That's the only way that I can be secure because every router in America has been compromised. We've been warning about it for years, nobody pays attention until something like WikiLeaks comes up and says 'look, this is what's happening'. And it is devastating in terms of the impact on American privacy because once the router...

Confirmed: Alex Jones' popularity rises after Infowars banning from social media

globinfo freexchange We wouldn't expect to be confirmed so fast on this. A few days ago in the article IT and social media supergiants have just made Alex Jones a hero in the eyes of the ultra-conservative audience , we wrote that Alex Jones' wet dream has just become reality thanks to the combined move by Facebook, Apple, YouTube and Spotify to ban Infowars. These private IT and social media companies couldn't give a better gift to him right now. At a time where Infowars was going through a saturated period according to the best scenario, the corporate giants actually saved it with that stupid(?) strategy. Suddenly, a corporate branch of the liberal establishment gave real value to Alex Jones' awful performance, pretending to be the 'anti-establishment' hero - just like Donald Trump - and made him a real hero in the eyes of the ultra-conservative audience that has been brainwashed by his absurd conspiracy theories. Only a couple of days later...

Stephen Hawking confirms: The problem is Capitalism, not robots!

globinfo freexchange According to world famous physicist Stephen Hawking, the rising use of automated machines may mean the end of human rights – not just jobs. But he’s not talking about robots with artificial intelligence taking over the world, he’s talking about the current capitalist political system and its major players. On Reddit, Hawking said that the economic gap between the rich and the poor will continue to grow as more jobs are automated by machines, and the owners of said machines hoard them to create more wealth for themselves. The insatiable thirst for capitalist accumulation bestowed upon humans by years of lies and terrible economic policy has affected technology in such a way that one of its major goals has become to replace human jobs. If we do not take this warning seriously, we may face unfathomable corporate domination. If we let the same people who buy and sell our political system and resources maintain control of automated technology, the...

CIA had an agent at a newspaper in every world capital at least since 1977

Joel Whitney is a co-founder of the magazine Guernica, a magazine of global arts and politics, and has written for many publications, including the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. His book Finks: How the C.I.A. Tricked the World's Best Writers describes how the CIA contributed funds to numerous respected magazines during the Cold War, including the Paris Review, to subtly promote anti-communist views. In their conversation, Whitney tells Robert Scheer about the ties the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom had with literary magazines. He talks about the CIA's attempt during the Cold War to have at least one agent in every major news organization in order to get stories killed if they were too critical or get them to run if they were favorable to the agency. And they discuss the overstatement of the immediate risks and dangers of communist regimes during the Cold War, which, initially, led many people to support the Vietnam War. globinfo freexchange...

How normal human behavior became a false mental disorder epidemic

globinfo freexchange In the early nineties, an epidemic of mental disorder was sweeping America and Britain. It had been uncovered by a new system for identifying disorders. Psychiatry had been attacked for relying on the personal and fallible judgement of psychiatrists. But instead, a new objective method based on checklists had been invented. These listed only the objective symptoms, and deliberately did not enquire into why the individuals felt an anxiety. In the late 80s, nationwide surveys had revealed an incredible picture: more than 50% of Americans suffered from mental disorders. But at the very same, the drug companies had announced that they had created a new type of drug, called an SSRI, which they claimed, targeted the circuits inside the brain that were causing these malfunctions. The SSRIs were marketed under names like "Prozac". What they did was alter the amounts of serotonin that flowed across the circuit connections within the brain, and they...

Confirmed: US imperialists wanted to drag Russia into a war with Ukraine since at least 2019

globinfo freexchange As we wrote in our previous article, after almost eight years, the US imperialists and the NATO criminals got what they wanted. They finally managed to drag Russia into a war with Ukraine. We now have indisputable evidence for that, through a document by the top US think tank, RAND Corporation. In the preface of a 2019 report under the title Extending Russia, Competing from Advantageous Ground we read: [emphasis added] The purpose of the project was to examine a range of possible means to extend Russia. By this, we mean nonviolent measures that could stress Russia’s military or economy or the regime’s political standing at home and abroad. The steps we posit would not have either defense or deterrence as their prime purpose, although they might contribute to both. Rather, these steps ar...

the unbalanced evolution of homo sapiens

Search This Blog