The Washington Post fails to support their point with their listing of means refined and used in Afghanistan and Iraq to fight insurgents and terrorists now used by our police. It misses the point because our military adopted many police means to help fight what in one sense could be thought of as gangs and organized crime, in the sense that people organized to do bad things could be observed, tracked, and predicted with police methods and tools.
The Obama administration is fine with this:
"The old view that 'if we fight the terrorists abroad, we won't have to fight them here' is just that - the old view," Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told police and firefighters recently.
The Obama administration heralds this local approach as a much-needed evolution in the way the country confronts terrorism.
But while this trend predates the Obama administration, when you explicitly downgrade the war aspect of fighting Islamist terrorism to focus on law enforcement, that's what you get. And we can expect more untrained local Barney Fifes who shouldn't be allowed to carry a loaded weapon let alone pose as local intelligence officers, as the article highlights, to compile files on people whose threat level shouldn't rise to the level of official notice. We should be free to do what police think are "unusual" things without being seen and recorded as a threat. The part on the quality of some of the people who train locals is horrifying--they'll do more harm than good if the locals actually absorb what they are taught.
I've said it before (noting here a March 2003 post on my original site on the issue) and I'll say it again, our civil liberties depend on destroying our enemies on offense overseas (using military and non-military means) where the Islamists fight us and draw their justification and recruits. Sitting on defense, focusing on homeland defense inside our country just means our civil liberties will erode a little more every time the enemy hits us at home as we ratchet up defenses to cope with the last attack or attempted attack.
Fighting the Islamo-fascists isn't curtailing our civil liberties--failing to defeat them is doing that. I think the article is useful, at least, in pointing out what we are creating here at home as the war drags on.
