send that child off to kill and/or die...

4/8/2016

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Mandatory School Testing Gone Way Wrong:

​How Thousands of High School Students May Be Pushed Into a Pentagon Enlistment Exam
Tests will be proctored by military officials.

By Pat Elder /  War Is A Crime from Alternet

Thousands of New Jersey high school seniors may be taking the military’s enlistment exam to fulfill a graduation requirement because they opted out of the controversial PARCC tests when they were juniors.
Nearly 50,000 New Jersey high school seniors are required to take an alternative end-of-year assessment because they opted out of taking the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, (PARCC) test last year. School officials say “a significant number” of these students will now likely have to take either the College Board’s ACCUPLACER test or the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, (ASVAB) as approved pathways to graduation. The costly ACCUPLACER is a product of the College Board, while the free-of-charge ASVAB is the military’s enlistment test that is given to 650,000 students in 14,000 schools across the country. Its primary purpose, according to military documents, is to procure leads for recruiters.

The staggering numbers of New Jersey 11th graders who opted out of taking the PARCC test last year may have done so as a result of a coordinated campaign. South Brunswick New Jersey’s Board of Education Vice President Dan Boyle explained during a board meeting last month, “Throughout the state, there are an inordinate amount of students that are not qualified to graduate,” Boyle said at the time. “That is almost directly a result of the (PARCC) opt-out movement.”
The robust testing opt-out movement in New Jersey and throughout the country has targeted the corporatization and standardization of American education. United Opt Out National serves as a focal point of resistance to corporatized education reform. The group demands “an equitably funded, democratically based, anti-racist, desegregated public school system for all Americans that prepares students to exercise compassionate and critical decision making with civic virtue.”

The group plans an Opt Out Conference in Philadelphia, February 26-28, 2016 with noted speakers Chris Hedges, Jill Stein, and Bill Ayers.

Even as students opt out of these outrageously expensive testing regimes, Pearson’s PARCC test will cost New Jersey about $108 million over 4 years. Pearson, the goliath textbook/testing company, has $8 billion in global sales. The company got in trouble in New York three years ago when it made a practice of treating school officials to European trips.
The Army, with a keen eye on educational currents, saw the opening and was eager to exploit the PARCC opt-out movement by offering it’s free ASVAB Career Exploration Program in place of the PARCC. After all, the Army reasoned, the kids must have a pathway toward graduation and the Army was honored to provide the “public service”.
In 2014 New Jersey began allowing students to take the ASVAB as a substitute for the PARCC test. To graduate, students are expected to score a 31 on the Armed Forces Qualifications Test, (AFQT). A 31 is the minimum score for enlistment in the Army. The AFQT uses sections of the ASVAB to calculate the score.
Recruiting commanders have widely distributed a Concordance Table that compares AFQT test results to those on the College Board’s SAT tests. According to the table a 31 on the AFQT equates to a 690 SAT composite score. The SAT composite score is the total of SAT critical reading and math subsections.
In 2006, 313 students of 1.37 million test takers scored 690 or below on the SAT composite score for a .02% score nationally. A 690 won’t gain admittance to a New Jersey state college. A score of a 31 on the ASVAB is roughly equivalent to a 7th to 8th grade level, good enough to use for a ticket to a high school diploma in New Jersey.

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Even as students opt out of these outrageously expensive testing regimes, Pearson’s PARCC test will cost New Jersey about $108 million over 4 years. Pearson, the goliath textbook/testing company, has $8 billion in global sales. The company got in trouble in New York three years ago when it made a practice of treating school officials to European trips.
The Army, with a keen eye on educational currents, saw the opening and was eager to exploit the PARCC opt-out movement by offering it’s free ASVAB Career Exploration Program in place of the PARCC. After all, the Army reasoned, the kids must have a pathway toward graduation and the Army was honored to provide the “public service”.
In 2014 New Jersey began allowing students to take the ASVAB as a substitute for the PARCC test. To graduate, students are expected to score a 31 on the Armed Forces Qualifications Test, (AFQT). A 31 is the minimum score for enlistment in the Army. The AFQT uses sections of the ASVAB to calculate the score.
Recruiting commanders have widely distributed a Concordance Table that compares AFQT test results to those on the College Board’s SAT tests. According to the table a 31 on the AFQT equates to a 690 SAT composite score. The SAT composite score is the total of SAT critical reading and math subsections.
In 2006, 313 students of 1.37 million test takers scored 690 or below on the SAT composite score for a .02% score nationally. A 690 won’t gain admittance to a New Jersey state college. A score of a 31 on the ASVAB is roughly equivalent to a 7th to 8th grade level, good enough to use for a ticket to a high school diploma in New Jersey.

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The April, 2015 Army Recruiter Journal described the Army’s lobbying campaign in New Jersey and gloated that the ASVAB “would be accepted as a substitute competency test for students who fail to pass the PARCC.”

While the military routinely claims the ASVAB is being shut out of schools, the brass has managed to convince school officials in a half dozen states to make the ASVAB an alternative option for end-of-year senior year assessments to provide a path for students who cannot pass the front line tests. A thousand schools across the country require students to take the test.

Minnesota allows high school seniors who fail mandated exit exams to take the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) as an alternative assessment.
​
New Mexico allows a score of a 31 on the ASVAB to provide a path to graduation.
Mississippi wants a senior to score a 36 on the AFQT before he can graduate.
Kentucky calls for a 55 on the AFQT for a student to earn a diploma. A 55 on the AFQT is the same as a composite SAT score of 840, according to the ASVAB Concordance Table. An 840 won't open many college doors. It represents the bottom 5th of national SAT scores.
Colorado is considering using the ASVAB as a potential graduation requirement.
Missouri has taken a different track to normalize military testing. The Missouri School Improvement Program calls on high schools to administer the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery Career Exploration Program (ASVAB-CEP) to determine whether students are "Career Ready."
Military regulations allow the ASVAB-CEP to be administered without results being used for recruitment purposes, although school officials are convinced by representatives from the recruiting command to allow the release of student data to recruiters.

Historically, about 85% of students nationally who take the ASVAB at school have had their results sent to recruiters. Test results also include social security numbers and detailed demographic information. Published reports from New Jersey and the states mentioned herein fail to address the raison d'etre of the ASVAB testing regime, which is to provide leads for recruiters. Furthermore, state departments of education and local school boards continuously suggest that school officials will be giving the ASVAB, when in fact, military officials give the test.
It is an important distinction. The military is adamant about proctoring their enlistment exam, rather than relying on school administrators and teachers. If schools administered the 3-hour ASVAB, results would be regarded as educational records and therefore subject to the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act or FERPA. This law precludes the release of sensitive student information to third parties without parental consent. ASVAB records are considered to be military documents when the DOD gives the test in the high schools. ASVAB results are the only information leaving American classrooms about children without providing for parental consent.

This piece originally appeared at WarIsaCrime.org
Pat Elder is the director of the National Coalition to Protect Student Privacy, an organization that works to prohibit the release of student information to military recruiting services from the nation's high schools.  www.studentprivacy.org

New recruits swear in during the Army Reserve Mega Event in Whitehall, Ohio,

The Wars in Our Schools

4/7/2016

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High school students in the Junior ROTC. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

An Ex-Army Ranger Finds a New Mission

By Rory Fanning, TomDispatch

Early each New Year's Day I head for Lake Michigan with a handful of friends. We look for a quiet stretch of what, only six months earlier, was warm Chicago beach. Then we trudge through knee-deep snow in bathing suits and boots, fighting wind gusts and hangovers. Sooner or later, we arrive where the snowpack meets the shore and boot through a thick crust of lake ice, yelling and swearing as we dive into near-freezing water.
It took me a while to begin to understand why I do this every year, or for that matter why for the last decade since I left the military I've continued to inflict other types of pain on myself with such unnerving regularity. Most days, for instance, I lift weights at the gym to the point of crippling exhaustion. On summer nights, I sometimes swim out alone as far as I can through mats of hairy algae into the black water of Lake Michigan in search of what I can only describe as a feeling of falling.
A few years ago, I walked across the United States with 50 pounds on my back for the Pat Tillman Foundation in an obsessive attempt to rid myself of "my" war. On the weekends, I clean my house similarly obsessively. And it's true, sometimes I drink too much.
In part, it seems, I've been in search of creative ways to frighten myself, apparently to relive the moments in the military I said I never wanted to go through again -- or so a psychiatrist told me anyway. According to that doctor (and often I think I'd be the last to know), I'm desperately trying to recreate adrenalizing moments like the one when, as an Army Ranger, I jumped out of an airplane at night into an area I had never before seen, not sure if I was going to be shot at as I hit the ground. Or I'm trying to recreate the energy I felt leaping from a Blackhawk helicopter, night vision goggles on, and storming my way into some nameless Afghan family's home, where I would proceed to throw a sandbag over someone's head and lead him off to an American-controlled, Guantánamo-like prison in his own country.
This doctor says it's common enough for my unconscious to want to relive the feeling of learning that my friend had just been blown up by a roadside bomb while on patrol at two in the morning, a time most normal people are sleeping. Somehow, at the oddest hours, my mind considers it perfectly appropriate to replay the times when rockets landed near my tent at night in a remote valley in Afghanistan. Or when I was arrested by the military after going AWOL as one of the first Army Rangers to try to say no to participation in George W. Bush's Global War on Terror.
I'm aware now, as I wasn't some years back, that my post-war urge for limits-testing is not atypical of the home-front experiences of many who went to war in Afghanistan or Iraq in these years and, for some of them, judging by the soaring suicide rates among Global War on Terror vets, the urge has proven so much more extreme than mine. But more than a decade after leaving the army as a conscientious objector, I can at least finally own up to and testify to the eeriness of what we all brought home from America's twenty-first-century wars, even those of us who weren't physically maimed or torn up by them.
And here's the good news at a purely personal level: the older I get the less I'm inclined towards such acts of masochism, of self-inflicted pain. Part of the change undoubtedly involves age -- I hesitate to use the word "maturity" yet -- but there's another reason, too. I found a far better place to begin to put all that stored up, jumpy energy. I began speaking to high school students heavily propagandized by the US military on the charms, delights, and positives of war, American-style, about my own experiences and that, in turn, has been changing my life. I'd like to tell you about it.
Filling in the Blanks
The first time I went to speak to high school students about my life with the Rangers in Afghanistan, I was surprised to realize that the same nervous energy I felt before jumping into Lake Michigan or lacing up my gym shoes for a bone-shaking work-out was coursing through my body. But here was the strangest thing: when I had said my piece (or perhaps I really mean "my peace") with as much honesty as I could muster, I felt the very sense of calmness and resolution that I'd been striving for with my other rituals and could never quite hang onto come over me -- and it stayed with me for days.
That first time, I was one of the few white people in a deteriorating Chicago public high school on the far south side of the city. A teacher is escorting me down multiple broad, shabby hallways to the classroom where I was to speak. We pass a room decorated with a total of eight American flags, four posted on each side of its door. "The recruiting office," the teacher says, gesturing toward it, and then asks, "Do they have recruiting offices in the suburban schools you talk to?"
"I'm not sure. I haven't spoken to any on this topic yet," I reply. "They certainly didn't have an obvious one at the public high school I went to, but I do know that there are 10,000 recruiters across the country working with a $700 million a year advertising budget. And I think you're more likely to see the recruiters in schools where kids have less options after graduation."
At that moment, we arrive at the appointed classroom and I'm greeted warmly by the social studies teacher who invited me. Photos of Ida B. Wells, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcom X, and other revolutionary black leaders hang neatly on a wall. He first heard about my desire to talk to students about my wartime experiences through Veterans for Peace, an organization I belong to. "There is no counter-narrative to what the kids are being taught by the instructors in Junior ROTC, as far as I can tell," he says, obviously bothered, as we wait for the students to arrive. "It would be great if you could provide more of a complete picture to these kids." He then went on to describe the frustration he felt with a Chicago school system in which schools in the poorest neighborhoods in the city were being shut down at a record pace, and yet, somehow, his school district always had the money to supplement the Pentagon's funding of the JROTC (Junior Reserve Officer Training) program.
The kids are just beginning to filter in, laughing and acting like the teenagers they are. I'm not encouraged.
"Okay, everyone, settle down, we have a guest speaker today," the teacher says. He oozes confidence of a sort I only wish I possessed. The volume in the room dies down to something approaching a hush. They clearly respect him. I only hope a little of that will spill over in my direction.
I hesitate a moment and then start, and here's a little report from memory on at least part of what I said and what happened:
"Thanks," I begin, "for having me in today. My name is Rory Fanning and I'm here to tell you why I joined the military. I'll also talk about what I saw while I was in that military, and why I left before my contract was up." The silence in the classroom stretches out, which encourages me and I plunge on.
"I signed up for the Army Rangers to have my student loans paid for and to do my part to prevent another terrorist attack like 9/11... My training was sometimes difficult and usually boring... A lot of food and sleep deprivation. Mostly, I think my chain of command was training me in how to say yes to their orders. The military and critical thinking don't mix too well..."
As I talk on about the almost indescribable poverty and desperation I witnessed in Afghanistan, a country that has known nothing but occupation and civil war for decades and that, before I arrived, I knew less than nothing about, I could feel my nervousness abating. "The buildings in Kabul," I was telling them, "have gaping holes in them and broken-down Russian tanks and jets litter the countryside."
I can hardly restrain my amazement. The kids are still with me. I'm now explaining how the US military handed out thousands of dollars to anyone willing to identify alleged members of the Taliban and how we would raid houses based on this information. "I later came to find out that this intelligence, if you could call it that, was rooted in a kind of desperation." I explain why an Afghan in abject poverty, looking for ways to support his family, might be ready to finger almost anyone in return for access to the deep wells of cash the US military could call on. In a world where factories are few, and office jobs scarce indeed, people will do anything to survive. They have to.
I point out the almost unbearable alien quality of Afghan life to American military officials. Few spoke a local language. No one I ever ran into knew anything about the culture of the people we were trying to bribe. Too often we broke down doors and snatched Afghans from their homes not because of their ties with either the Taliban or al-Qaeda, but because a neighbor had a grudge against them.
"Most of the people we targeted had no connection to the Taliban at all. Some even pledged allegiance to the US occupation, but that didn't matter." They still ended up with hoods over their heads and in some godforsaken prison.
By now, I can tell that the kids are truly paying attention, so I let it all out. "The Taliban had surrendered a few months before I arrived in Afghanistan in late 2002, but that wasn't good enough for our politicians back home and the generals giving the orders. Our job was to draw people back into the fight."
Two or three students let out genuine soft gasps as I describe how my company of Rangers occupied a village school and our commander cancelled classes there indefinitely because it made an excellent staging point for the troops -- and there wasn't much a village headmaster in rural Afghanistan could say to dissuade history's most technologically advanced and powerful military from doing just what it wanted to. "I remember," I tell them, "watching two fighting-age men walk by the school we were occupying. One of them didn't show an acceptable level of deference to my first sergeant, so we grabbed them. We threw the overly confident guy in one room and his friend in another, and the guy who didn't smile at us properly heard a gunshot and thought, just as he was meant to, that we had just killed his friend for not telling us what we wanted to hear and that he might be next."
"That's like torture," one kid half-whispers.
I then talk about why I'm more proud of leaving the military than of anything I did while in it. "I signed up to prevent another 9/11, but my two tours in Afghanistan made me realize that I was making the world less safe. We know now that a majority of the million or so people who have been killed since 9/11 have been innocent civilians, people with no stake in the game and no reason to fight until, often enough, the US military baited them into it by killing or injuring a family member who more often than not was an innocent bystander."
"Did you know," I continue, quoting a statistic cited from University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape, "that 'from 1980 to 2003, there were 343 suicide attacks around the world, and at most 10% were anti-American inspired. Since 2004, there have been more than 2,000, over 91% against US and allied forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other countries.' I didn't want to be part of this so I left."
Full Disclosure
Chicago-area high school students aren't used to hearing such talk. The public school system here has the largest number of Junior ROTC students -- nearly 10,000 of them, 45% African American and 50% Latino -- of any school district in the country. And maybe so many of these kids are attentive exactly because the last thing JROTC instructors are likely to be discussing is the realities of war, including, for instance, the staggering number of homeless Iraq and Afghanistan veterans unable to assimilate back into society after their experience overseas.
When I urge the students to join me in a conversation about war and their lives, I hear stories about older siblings deluged by telemarketer-style calls from recruiters. "It's so annoying," one says. "My brother doesn't even know how the recruiter got his information."
"Recruiters have contact information for every junior and senior in this school," I say. "And that's the law. The No Child Left Behind act, signed soon after 9/11, insists that your school hand over your information to the Department of Defense if it wants to receive federal funds."
Soon enough, it becomes clear that these students have very little context for their encounters with the US military and its promises of an uplifting future. They know next to nothing, for instance, about our recent history in Iraq and Afghanistan, or our permanent state of war in the Greater Middle East and increasingly in Africa. When I ask why so many of them signed up for the JROTC program, they talk about "leadership" opportunities and "structure" for their lives. They are focused, as I was, on having college paid for or "seeing the world." Some say they are in JROTC because they didn't want to take gym class. One offers this honest assessment: "I don't know, I just am. I haven't given it much thought."
As I grill them, so they grill me. "What does your family think about your leaving the military?" one asks.
"Well," I respond, "we don't talk about it too much. I come from a very pro-military family and they prefer not to think of what we are doing overseas as wrong. I think this is why it took me so long to speak honestly in public about my time in the military."
"Did other factors weigh on your decision to talk openly about your military experience, or was it just fear of your family's response?" an astute student asks.
And I answer as honestly as I can: "Even though, as far as I know, I did something no one in the Rangers had yet done in the post-9/11 era -- the psychological and physical vetting process for admission to the Ranger Regiment makes the likelihood of a Ranger questioning the mission and leaving the unit early unlikely -- I was intimidated. I shouldn't have been, but my chain of command had me leaving the military looking over my shoulder. They made it seem as if they could drag me off to jail or send me back into the military to be a bullet stopper in the big Army at any time if I ever talked about my service in the Rangers. I did after all, like all Rangers, have a secret security clearance." Heads shake. "The military and paranoia go hand in hand. So I kept quiet," I tell the kids. "I also started reading books like Anand Gopal's No Good Men Among the Living, a reporter's brilliant story of our invasion of Afghanistan as told from the perspective of actual Afghans. And I began meeting veterans who had experiences similar to mine and were speaking out. This helped boost my confidence."
"Is the military like Call of Duty?" one of the students asks, referring to a popular single-shooter video game.
"I've never played," I respond. "Does it include kids who scream when their mothers and fathers are killed? Do a lot of civilians die?"
"Not really," he says uncomfortably.
"Well, then it's not realistic. Besides, you can turn off a video game. You can't turn off war."
A quiet settles over the room that even a lame joke of mine can't break. Finally, after a silence, one of the kids suddenly says, "I've never heard anything like this before."
What I feel is the other side of that response. That first experience of mine talking to America's future cannon fodder confirms my assumption that, not surprisingly, the recruiters in our schools aren't telling the young anything that might make them think twice about the glories of military life.
I leave that school with an incredible sense of calm, something I haven't felt since my time began in Afghanistan. I tell myself I want to speak to classrooms at least once a week. I realize that it took me 10 years, even while writing a book on the subject, to build up the courage to talk openly about my years in the military. If only I had begun engaging these kids earlier instead of punishing myself for the experience George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and their cohorts put me through. Suddenly, some of my resident paranoia seems to melt away, and the residual guilt I still felt for leaving the Rangers early and in protest -- the chain of command left me believing that there was nothing more cowardly than "deserting" your Ranger buddies -- seems to evaporate, too.
My thought now is full disclosure going forward. If a teenager is going to sign up to kill and die for a cause or even the promise of a better life, then the least he or she should know is the good, the bad, and the ugly about the job. I had no illusions that plenty of kids -- maybe most of them, maybe all of them -- wouldn't sign up anyway, regardless of what I said. But I swear to myself: no moralism, no regrets, no judgments. That's my credo now. Just the facts as I see them.
A New Mission
I'm on an operation and that feels strangely familiar. Think of it as a different way to be a Ranger in a world that will never, it seems, be truly postwar. But as with all things in one's mind: easier said than done. The world, it turns out, is in no rush to welcome me on my new mission.
I start making calls. I create a website to advertise my talk. I send out word to teacher friends that I'm available to speak in their schools. I'm prepared for my schedule to fill up within weeks, but a month passes and no one calls. The phone just doesn't ring. I grow increasingly frustrated. Fortunately, a friend tells me about a grant sponsored by the Chicago Teachers Union and designed to expose kids to real world educational experiences they may not hear about in school. I apply, promising to speak to 12 of the 46 schools in Chicago with JROTC programs during the 2015/2016 school year. The grant comes through in September and better yet it promises that each student I talk to will also get a free copy of my book, Worth Fighting For.
I don't for a second doubt that this will ensure my presence in front of classrooms of kids. I have nine long months to arrange meetings with only 12 schools. I decide that I'll even throw in some extra schools as a bonus. I create a Facebook page so that teachers and principals can learn about my talk and book me directly. Notices of both my website and that page are placed in teacher newsletters and I highlight the Chicago Teachers Union endorsement in them. I'm thinking: slam dunk! I even advertise on message boards, spend money on targeted ads on Facebook, and again reach out to all my teacher friends.
It's now April, seven months into the school year, and only two teachers have taken me up on the offer to speak. "He was comfortable and engaging with the students and in the students' reflections the following day he was someone that the students clearly enjoyed talking with. I will definitely ask him to come back to speak to my classes every year," wrote Dave Stieber, one of those teachers.
It's finally starting to dawn on me, however. In our world, life is scary and I'm not the only one heading for Lake Michigan on cold winter mornings or gloomy nights. Teachers out there in the public schools are anxious, too. It's dark days for them. They are under attack and busy fighting back against school privatization, closures, and political assaults on their pensions. The popular JROTC program is a cash cow for their schools and they are discouraged from further rocking a boat already in choppy waters.
You'll bring too much "tension" to our school, one teacher tells me with regret. "Most of my kids need the military if they plan on going to college," I hear from another who says he can't invite me to his school anyway. But most of my requests simply go out into the void unanswered. Or promises to invite me go unfulfilled. Who, after all, wants to make waves or extracurricular trouble when teachers are already under fierce attack from Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his unelected school board?
I understand and yet, in a world without a draft, JROTC's school-to-military pipeline is a lifeline for Washington's permanent war across the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa. Its unending conflicts are only possible because kids like those I've talked to in the few classrooms I've visited continue to volunteer. The politicians and the school boards, time and again, claim their school systems are broke. No money for books, teacher's salaries and pensions, healthy lunches, etc...
And yet, in 2015, the US government spent $598 billion on the military, more than half of its total discretionary budget, and nearly 10 times what it spent on education. In 2015, we also learned that the Pentagon continues to pour what, it is estimated, will in the end be $1.4 trillion into a fleet of fighter planes that may never work as advertised. Imagine the school system we would have in this country if teachers were compensated as well as weapons contractors. Confronting the attacks on education in the US should also mean, in part, trying to interrupt that school-to-military pipeline in places like Chicago. It's hard to fight endless trillion-dollar wars if kids aren't enlisting.
Just the other day I spoke at a college in Peoria, three hours south of Chicago. "My brother hasn't left the house since returning home from Iraq," one of the students told me with tears in her eyes. "What you said helped me understand his situation better. I might have more to say to him now."
It was the sort of comment that reminded me that there is an audience for what I have to say. I just need to figure out how to get past the gatekeepers. Believe me, I'll continue to write about, pester, and advertise my willingness to talk to soon-to-be-military-age kids in Chicago. I'm not giving up, because speaking honestly about my experiences is now my therapy. At the end of the day, I need those students as much as I think they need me.

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MAST Academy Coast Guard JROTC visiting Coast Guard Station Miami Beach

To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here. RORY FANNING Rory Fanning walked across the United States for the Pat Tillman Foundation in 2008–2009, following two deployments to Afghanistan with the 2nd Army Ranger Battalion. He is a housing and antiwar activist living in Chicago, Illinois. He is also the author of Worth Fighting For: An Army Ranger's Journey Out of the Military and Across America (Haymarket Books, 2014). Follow him on Twitter @RTFanning.

Evans High School students work at drilling during JROTC practice. 

Rory’s writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Nation, Mother Jones, Salon, Common Dreams, TomDispatch, Socialist Worker and many other outlets.

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The Military Invasion of My High School The role of JROTC BY SYLVIA McGAULEY

cop shoots 'em down, kills 'em, and then sues their family... 4/6/2016 0 Comments   by E.L. Christianson Jr. Here is a 'good one'.   A police officer is called because a young man got into an argument with his father. The father called police and then asked a neighbor to let officers into the building when they arrived.  The police officer shot the young man 6 times, killing him and shot the neighbor 1 time, killing her also.  It happens all too frequently.  The cops come for a minor disturbance and over-react, killing people both intentionally and unintentionally.  Now comes the 'good part'... almost like the punch line of a joke... the police officer feels traumatized because of the killings and wants to sue someone for causing this trauma to his sensitive emotional system.  So, he sues the family of the young man that he killed... "because wantonly killing that young man was so upsetting to me, I need to be compensated..." Apparently, there are no questions about the emotional distress caused to the families of the victims.  Perhaps they should feel fortunate to still be alive. Chicago police officer Robert Rialmo is suing For “Emotional Distress” ​Chicago police officer Robert Rialmo was so traumatized after he killed Quintonio LeGrier and his neighbor Bettie Jones last December that LeGrier's estate should pay him $10 million. neighbor accidentally shot dead by cop RELATED STORIES Chicago Cop Wants To Sue Family Of Teenager He Shot For “Emotional Distress” by Robyn Pennacchia | The Friskey Chicago Police Misconduct Payouts Topped $50 Million in 2014 By Jonah Newman, The Chicago Reporter | Report Chicago Just Became the First US City to Pay Reparations to Victims of Police Torture By Araz Hachadourian, YES! Magazine | News Analysis Chicago Police Officer Charged With Murder After Video Shows Him Shooting Laquan McDonald 16 Times By Juan González, Amy Goodman, Democracy Now! | Video Interview

strange beliefs 4/5/2016 0 Comments   by E.L. Christianson Jr. Human beings are amazing.  Without TV, people in the past spent their time looking toward the sky.  This has been a major activity of people for as long as we have been here on Earth.  Ancient peoples were much more familiar with the sky than modern people. For one thing, the sky... the heavens were the home of the gods throughout most of human history and on most parts of the planet.  Watching what was going on 'above' was an important aspect of life. Any celestial event got noticed, but comets were, and are, major attention getters.  More so than meteor showers, northern lights, novas and eclipses, comets were interpretated in many different ways, some good and some bad. But, today, in this modern world we know much more than our ancient ancestors knew.  We recognize, from a scientific mind-set, that 'heavenly events' are the result of predictable circumstances.  Recently, we humans sent our rocket up and landed on an incoming comet so that we could analyze its substance more accurately. That's progress. And yet, here we are in the 21st century and we are still following the examples set by people 10 thousand years ago.  We have divided ourselves based, at least in part, on some vague belief system that involves looking toward the 'heavens' as the home of gods. We run around the planet killing those whose belief in god is different from our own belief in god.  Even when we claim to beieve in the very same god, we still kill based upon the variations of that belief... Protestants and Catholics kill each other over this varied beilef and Shia and Sunni kill each other over this same variation of believing in the same god.  Jews, Muslims and Christians all claim to believe in the same "God" but find reason to hate based upon some variation of that belief. In 1456, Pope Callixtus III excommunicated Halley's Comet because he believed it to be an "instrument of the devil and apparently, he believed, as an agent of 'God', he had the power to do something. In the 15th century, when humans knew so little and were despeartely trying to understand how things were, 'God' had a place.  Witches, werewolves, dragons, devils, and a whole host of things had a place.  They offered explanations for humans at a level that humans could understand. Belief in a magical god who lived in the sky and watched over human activity with a protective eye was comforting when there were no better explanations available.  That 'God works in mysterious ways' is feels better than 'we don't know or understand'. But that was then and this is now.  We have transmitted detailed information about a particular comet through space and received that information on our instruments here on Earth.  We now know that comets are not omens and bearers of bad news. And yet, at least in this Christian country, most people who don't actually follow the teachings, profess some sort of belief in that magical god. Scientific knowledge works. Yet beliefs, claims that are not and often can never be known, have caused human beings to kill each other in wars at least since the first city states were organized around 4,000 BCE.  The people who lived in these states believed that their cities were protected by patron deities and when the cities went to war, the war was thought of as fought for or even by the deities themselves. Ever since, war has always had a religious aspect. Armies have always gone into battle believing god was on their side, even when two peoples who claimed to believe in the same god fought each other. The absurdity of that seems to have always eluded people. It is noteworthy that even today the leaders of nations ask their patron deities to bless their countries. The American president, for instance, always asks god to bless America, never the American people. Gods, it seems, only protect states, not their peoples who are decimated in wars for the sake of their nations. Remember John F. Kennedy’s “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” Throughout human history, people, like soldier ants, have always existed to preserve the state rather than visa versa. So here we are, seven millennia since the founding of city states, still acting just like the pagans of Mesopotamia. For seven millennia of belief guided human history, the progress of human nature has stood still! ... and that's the truth !!!

Police get away with Everything & Anything

4/4/2016

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​Investigative journalist Radley Balko has been researching police abuse in South Carolina and in a preview of his upcoming series on the matter, he released this particularly awful account. Aiken police officerspulled over Lakeya Hicks and Elijah Pontoon in Lakeya’s recently purchased car that still had temporary tags on it.

From the Washington Post:

In the video, Medlin asks Hicks to get out, then tells her that he stopped her because of the “paper tag” on her car. This already is a problem. There’s no law against temporary tags in South Carolina, so long as they haven’t expired.

Medlin then asks Pontoon for identification. Since he was in the passenger seat, Pontoon wouldn’t have been required to provide ID even if the stop had been legitimate. Still, he provides his driver’s license to Medlin. A couple of minutes later, Medlin tells Hicks that her license and tags check out. (You can see the time stamp in the lower left corner of the video.) This should be the end of the stop — which, again, should never have happened in the first place.
But, Medlin was just getting started. He ordered both out of the car and called in a drug dog. He even told Elijah Pontoon, “You gonna pay for this one, boy.” More officers arrived, including the K9, and they did an exhaustive search of the car. Still coming up empty, they did additional searches on both Hicks and Pontoon. Medlin instructed the female officer to “search her real good” while Medlin personally searched Pontoon. Still finding nothing, Medlin did the unthinkable:

The anal probe happens out of direct view of the camera, but the audio leaves little doubt about what’s happening. Pontoon at one point says that one of the officers is grabbing his hemorrhoids. Medlin appears to reply, “I’ve had hemorrhoids, and they ain’t that hard.” At about 12:47:15 in the video, the audio actually suggests that two officers may have inserted fingers into Pontoon’s rectum, as one asks, “What are you talking about, right here?” The other replies, “Right straight up in there.”

Pontoon then again tells the officers that they’re pushing on a hemorrhoid. One officer responds, “If that’s a hemorrhoid, that’s a hemorrhoid, all right? But that don’t feel like no hemorrhoid to me.”
After all of that, what did police do? They gave the couple a “courtesy warning” and didn’t even outline what infraction they were being warned about. Officer Medlin is still with the Aiken Department of Public Safety. See the outrageous video below and be sure to read further details and expert opinion from Radley Balko at The Washington Post.

execution, American style...

4/4/2016

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by E.L. Christianson Jr.

Shoot 'em dead.  It is not related in any way to 'justice'.  It does not have anything to do with enforcing the 'law'.  It does not involve any aspect of 'crime prevention'.  It is not 'self defense'.  What it is, is murder.  When a person is holding a gun, is pointing that gun at an unarmed human being who is at a considerable distance away and then makes a conscious decision to pull the trigger and shoot that human being, it is murder.

That a group of people, all holding guns and aiming at the same, lone human being and in unison shoot that human being, it is collective murder.  That the group of shooters are uniformed police officers does not change the facts of the murder.  The shooting of that human being does not constitute 'justice' and the murder cannot be viewed as 'law enforcement'.

If the human being was suspected of having committed a crime, then the goal of 'law enforcement' would be to arrest that person to be tried in court.  If found guilty of the crime, that person would be sentenced by the court to be punished.

But, in this country, we have authorized the police to act as the judge, the jury, and the executioner.  

What is the difference between a mob of people who lynch a black man and a mob of people who fill a black man full of bullet holes?

“Police are specialists in violence. They are armed, trained, and authorized to use force. With varying degrees of subtlety, this colors their every action. Like the possibility of arrest, the threat of violence is implicit in every police encounter. Violence, as well as the law, is what they represent.”

SAN FRANCISCO (CN) – A newly released autopsy confirms that Mario Woods was shot 21 times during a deadly altercation with San Francisco police officers on Dec. 2 last year.

Woods, whose death has sparked protests and a federal review of the city’s police department, was shot twice in the head and six times in the back according to an analysis of the autopsy reported by CNN and its affiliate, KRON-4.

Five officers unloaded their firearms into Woods, a 26-year-old, black man.  “The fact is he was shot in the back,” Burris said. “The significance to me is most of the officers who were shooting were not being threatened at the time they fired those weapons.”

The medical examiner’s report states that 27 bullet casings were recovered at the scene... watch video here at 'Filming Cops'.

It is not only that civilians are murdered at the hands of the police.  'Our' system allows them to beat the  "#@%&" out of anyone for whatever whimsical reason that occurs to them at the moment... Or, beat them to death...

The acquittal of two Fullerton, California police officers in the beating death of Kelly Thomas, a homeless man who was pummeled into a coma as he begged for his life, underscores the fact that cops now have a license to murder.

Thomas, a mentally disabled homeless man, was beaten, tasered, suffocated and pistol whipped as he lay on a street corner being sat on by no less than six police officers during an incident in July 2011.
In what is undoubtedly one of if not the most disturbing police brutality videos ever, Thomas can be heard pleading for his father, moaning, “Daddy, daddy, they are killing me,” as officers prolong the assault... see video here at infowars.

AND IT HAPPENS TO WHITE PEOPLE, TOO... Police claimed that the brutal pummeling they inflicted on Thomas was a justified response to his pathetic attempts to resist being murdered.

After Levi Frasier filmed a Denver police officer throw six powerful punches into the face of a suspected drug dealer, officers threatened Frasier with arrest unless he gave them the video, he tells RT.

The video is remarkable for its sheer level of brutality: Three police officers are seen holding down unarmed suspected drug dealer David Flores in a parking lot. After Flores ignores a command by police officer Charles Jones to release a sock from his mouth that he suspects contains narcotics, Jones delivers six consecutive punches to his face.

When Flores’s pregnant wife attempts to intervene, Jones trips her up and she falls, landing on her stomach...  see video here at RT.

Flores ended up in the hospital, while Denver police originally said the display of force by the officer was reasonable under the circumstances.

Just one week after airing of the videotape, the Denver Police Department awarded Jones a promotion.

Judge, jury & executioner: Police carrying out ‘death by firing squad’... what you saw is so many officers who decided to take the law in totality into their own hands. They executed the law – it was death by firing squad. The reason why the officer wasn’t found guilty is because they didn’t know who fired the lethal shot...​a police officer who tasered and pepper-sprayed a motorist, David Washington, who had suffered a stroke at the wheel of his car in Virginia. The second incident took place in Ohio after a cop, mistaking a backfiring car for gunshots, fired at the driver and passenger, Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams, respectively, up to 49 times.

Is there ever a justification for firing 137 times at an unarmed couple, as we saw in Cleveland?

... There is certainly no justification. This is the type of things that you see in movies; these are the things that you don’t even believe are real. To be in America and to experience this type of thing taking place, where the officer jumped on top of the hood.

First of all, that is very reckless for an officer to jump on the hood of a car, and then fire as many shots into the window, stopping to reload. This leads me to believe that this was not an officer who was in fear of his life. This is an officer who is bloodthirsty, who wanted to kill someone. An officer who wanted to do whatever he could to live out some wild video game fantasy.

If it were just a few “bad” cops terrorizing the citizenry, that would be one thing. But what we’re dealing with is a nationwide epidemic of court-sanctioned police violence carried out against individuals posing little or no threat of violence, who are nevertheless subjected to such excessive police force as to end up maimed or killed.

This is not about a philosophical pondering about the origins and nature of this abuse and brutality. The fact that there have been virtually zero convictions of guilty officers over the past generation tells us that the only place to turn to is perhaps the international criminal courts -- either the Organization of American States or the United Nations. Both criminal courts exist precisely for situations in which the courts in a given country do not function. And this is unquestionable when it comes to the brutalization of people of color in this country; the courts have never functioned. The issue of state-sponsored violence in this country is prima facie evidence that a reign of impunity for law enforcement has always existed, particularly when it relates to the abuse of the Black, Brown and Indigenous peoples of this country. Additionally, for these peoples, law enforcement has always functioned, more than anything, as a system of control.

Please read A ProPublica analysis of killings by police shows outsize risk for young black males.

Also read police murder innocent people without consequences and the police kill. ​

CIA ‘K-9 test’ gone wrong OR something else? 4/3/2016 0 Comments   Alert Virginia school district mechanic found C-4 explosive package planted on school bus in CIA "test" Plastic Explosives Found in Virginia School Bus ​Engine Compartment by District Mechanic by: Dave Lindorff   What on earth was the CIA doing putting plastic high explosive charges on schoolbuses and in hidden places in a Virginia public school in a “test” of K-9 dogs reportedly belonging to the Agency itself? The story of the secret “test” broke because an alert mechanic doing a routine check on one of the Loudon County School District’s schoolbuses found a package of what turned out to be plastic explosive, packed in a plastic wrapper, jammed down in among some of the rubber hoses and electric wires around the engine. It had allegedly “fallen” from where it had originally been placed, was missed by the dogs and their handlers, and remained where it was stuck for two days, while the bus was unwittingly used to deliver some 26 young children to and from school on eight separate bus runs totaling 145 miles of driving. I called the CIA’s “public information” office on Friday to ask for clarification as to why the CIA, which does not have a domestic policing function, would be operating, and testing, a K-9 bomb-detecting unit, given that such tasks in the US would normally be handled either by state and local police agencies, or by the FBI or the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (ATF). The office, though it was mid-day, was not answering its phones, and only had a voice mail recording, on which I identified myself as a reporter, left my contact information and requested a response on deadline. No surprise: I was not called back with an answer, and do not anticipate receiving one from an agency that is infamous for its secrecy. (The standard CIA response in my experience, when I’ve received one at all, is: “We have no response to that question.”) ​ Still, even for a notoriously opaque and obtuse government agency, this is a truly bizarre incident that cries out for answers. If the goal is testing the ability of dogs to detect hidden explosives, there is no need to run that test in a real school and in the engine compartments of real buses that transport real children, or to place such charges, as the CIA also reportedly did, in hidden locations inside a real school building. (Actually, since what’s being tested is the dogs' smelling ability, real C-4 wasn’t needed either -- only objects that had been in placed in contact with the compound, or wrappers from the charges that would have carried the odor on them.) People may benefit in training exercises when the tests are tricked out to appear more real-life, but dogs don’t need that kind of reality-theater environment to hone or test their skills. Any old bus, or for that matter a rental truck, could have been used for the job. The engine compartment for a truck is exactly the same as for a bus, and dogs don’t care whether the body color of a vehicle being searched is yellow or not (they're color-blind after all!), or whether it has a big box behind the cab, or two rows of seats. Ditto to using a functioning school building. Any building, including one of the CIA’s own buildings at its Langley headquarters, or on “The Farm” where agents are trained, would serve as well as a hiding place for explosive charges. ​ At best, using a real local school and real schoolbuses was an idiotic decision by CIA administrators. Plastic explosive, as the Washington Post explained in a lengthy if fairly credulous article on the incident, while highly explosive, is also quite stable, requiring both a very high temperature and a shock wave to explode. The compound is, however, also flammable, and even if it didn’t explode if ignited, would act as an accelerant if there were an engine fire on a bus, or somewhere in a school building, making such a fire far worse and far harder to control. Plus, while this is being called a test, and while we are being assured that there was no detonator included along with the planted charges, how do we really know that is true? After all, the whole idea of using a real school and real schoolbuses was to simulate reality. How far did the testers want to take that reality? Did the same people who thought it was important for the K-9 dogs to have yellow buses to work with think they should also see wires and detonators hooked up to the charges they were sniffing for? When something this apparently stupid is done, anything is possible, and given the CIA’s obsessive secrecy, we’re not going to get an answer unless some public body (Congress?, a Virginia legislative committee?) investigates and demands answers under oath. Of course, there are darker possibilities to consider too, when we discover an incident like this. There is plenty of evidence that over the past two decades, the US government and its intelligence and law-enforcement agencies have engaged in a number of so-called “false flag” operations, usually portrayed as “tests” gone wrong, or as “stings” designed to lure out alleged terrorists -- though these latter operations usually turn out on investigation to have been wholly government-created incidents where low-wattage victims are talked into participating in a terrorism action either for pay, or under the belief that they are working for the government. There are just too many occasions when some crazy terror plot either gets prominently “uncovered” and “prevented,” or actually is attempted right when the government could use some increased public sense of panic to help pass some new law diminishing Constitutionally-protected freedoms, or higher spending on war and government intelligence agencies. As one CIA veteran offers, "The only 'innocent' explanation as to why the agency was training locals on this is that the agency has more money than it knows what to do with, whereas others are not that flush," but this source adds, "There are a host of other, more sinister possible explanations. This needs to be looked into." There are certainly enough bozos in the US government’s intelligence and law-enforcement agencies, including the CIA, for me to believe that this school explosives “testing exercise” was just a really stupid idea gone wrong. But I’m also suspicious enough to believe that it could have been something much more insidious that didn’t go as planned only because of the alertness of one school district mechanic. ​ The Washington Post quotes a CIA statement issued about the incident as saying the CIA plans to take “immediate steps to strengthen inventory and control procedures in its K-9 program” and promising that it will investigate its K-9 training program. That’s clearly not enough. The CIA is the last agency that should be relied on to investigate itself about anything. OR something else?  Ohio School Hosts 'Counter-Terrorism' ​Bus Hijacking Drill from the our-old-nemesis,-fear,-conquered-and-re-established-yet-again dept. This is most notable for its injudicious (and apparently sincere) use of an exclamation point, which makes it sound more like a sudden but somewhat expected turn of events in a lousy YA novel rather than a bit of perverse showmanship in servitude to the War on Terror. Skenazy points out that the DHS considers bus drivers to be point men in our nation's anti-terrorist efforts, as buses are theoretically "soft targets" for attention-seeking hijackers. Now, the kids who participated were informed that something out of the ordinary would be happening during this bus trip to a parking lot according to Chief of Police Glenn Goss: Thank you for your concern for the students and children within our school district and community. I too would be concerned for any child who unwittingly was held hostage, tied up and threatened at gunpoint. The problem is: none of this happened. This was a well planned training exercise in which all participants (children and bus driver included) knew well in advance that they were participating in a training exercise to prepare for such an event to take place – which is very possible in our world today. Each student and participant signed waivers that acknowledged their participation in this training. There it is again -- the baseless claim that a bus hijacking is "very possible in our world today." And the addition of "our world today" makes it clear that Goss has bought everything the DHS is selling -- that we are in infinitely more danger today than we were pre-9/11. The more "dangerous" our world is, the more "necessary" these training exercises are, and the more "necessary" they are, the less likely anyone is to roll back policies or cut off funding. And, make no mistake, this drill had everything to do with the War on Terror. The Rossford Police Department is very proud to be part of a community that prepares for such incidents, even though we hope we never encounter them. Our proactive approach to counter-terrorism, active killers and other such incidents hopefully will save lives in the future…especially the lives of our children. Thank god for the "proactive approach." It allows agencies like this to advance the notion that kids should live in fear and trust their government. And it's nice to know that "active killers" are being prepared for. I would hate to see federal dollars being thrown at "inactive killers," the kind that can't be bothered to load their weapons, much less get off the couch. Altogether, the whole thing looks like nothing more than an excuse to break out the SWAT gear and let the locals know where all those tax dollars went. It does absolutely nothing to make anyone safer. OR something else?