Analyst's note: Is militarized police control of our media now our new America? Is this the "hope" and "change" that American voters thought they were getting? It is bad enough to have racially-charged protests over the police shooting of an unarmed teen boil over in St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, MO late Wednesday. It is time to demilitarize our police. Are we going to stand for this with our news media?
“We all got split up when a SWAT Team approached us and started throwing flash bangs and shooting tear gas and all kinds of [so-called] non-lethal rounds at us,” Biggs said, who was dropped to his knees by the round that hit him. “That took my breath away but when I was finally able to take a breath, I took in a nice helping of tear gas.”
The police also used helicopters as forward observers for the MRAPs crawling through clouds of tear gas like tanks during World War I.
“They are shutting down the entire road and there’s word that they are looking specifically for journalists to arrest them,” Biggs revealed. “Why? Because they don’t want the truth about what’s going on to come out.”
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Shocking footage out of Ferguson, Missouri shows that police are deliberately targeting journalists as part of a military-style crackdown that has caused outrage, with even Newsweek acknowledging that U.S. law enforcement is now akin to an occupying army.
Click HERE to see the raw video of AlJazeera of the American media being attacked and HERE for yet additional information.
The clip shows Al-Jazeera journalists preparing to do a live camera shot of the scene in Ferguson before they are hit with a round of tear gas. The reporters run in the opposite direction. Subsequent footage shows militarized police officers seizing and dismantling their camera equipment as another officer points a sniper rifle at the fleeing reporters.
It is important to emphasize that this is no longer about looting. The police were AWOL when the looting unfolded on Sunday night. Since that time the looting has all but stopped but the crackdown against peaceful protesters and journalists has intensified.
Two journalists working for the Huffington Post and the Washington Post were also arrested for not leaving a McDonalds quickly enough, as shown in the video below.
St. Louis alderman Antonio French was also arrested and held overnight for the crime of exiting his car. Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon announced this morning that he would visit the town as concerns about wider civil unrest grow.
In arresting, assaulting and intimidating local officials and journalists, Ferguson police are clearly trying to create a chilling effect to discourage media coverage of their brutality and scare other reporters away from covering the story.
The situation in Ferguson is so ominous that even Newsweek is now reporting that America’s police have “become an army” and are “indistinguishable from soldiers,” a chilling acknowledgment given that we were labeled “conspiracy theorists” time and time again for warning about martial law in the past.
By instituting a military-style occupation of the town and aggressively targeting journalists and peaceful protesters, authorities are only increasing the likelihood of further disorder and civil unrest spreading to other areas.
In a related development, the Anonymous hacker group publicly released the name of the officer responsible for shooting 18-year-old Michael Brown and have vowed to release his photo and address if authorities do not respond today.
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