Sightings of vehicles provokes fears of martial law

Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
Friday, June 22, 2012

St Louis City residents have been warned to not be alarmed at the sight of U.S. Army tanks rolling down residential neighborhoods after sightings of the vehicles provoked fears of martial law.

The exercise is part of a U.S. Army program run by military police from Fort Meade, Maryland focused around training MPs from St. Louis how to drive heavily armored tanks “on highways and on city streets.”

Sightings of the tanks prompted hundreds of residents to flood news channel KSDK’s Facebook page, with some expressing fears that martial law had arrived with others promising to “stop and salute” the tanks as they rolled by.

Reporting that he was told by the Army not to disclose the location of where the exercise was operating out of for “security reasons,” KSDK reporter Casey Nolan downplayed the exercise as “not such a big deal.”

U.S. Army Sergeant Cornelius Ivory discouraged citizens from taking video and photographs of the tanks and urged them not to get too close.

“They need to know to stay away from it,” Ivory told KSDK.

The exercise will run from June 21-28 in St. Louis, with the presence of the tanks being most noticeable in the area of the sixth district.

As we have exhaustively documented, the increasing shift towards domestic militarization of law enforcement is part of the acclimation process to get Americans comfortable with the idea of troops and tanks on the streets as a routine occurrence.

Earlier today we reported on how scores of paramilitary troops and soldiers appearing to be from the National Guard were deployed onto the streets of Hartford, Connecticut to break-up a recent annual Puerto Rican-American cultural event.

This is just the latest of scores of examples of how the military and National Guard is increasingly being deployed domestically to target the American people.

National Guard and U.S. Army troops are routinely involved in ‘urban warfare training’ drills. Usually such drills take place within the confines of military bases, however, more recently heavily armed troops are increasingly seenpatrolling residential neighborhoods and even the downtown areas of major US cities.

Such “invasions” are often reported on as nothing to worry about and even as “cool” by the mainstream media.

Back in 2008 the Washington Post reported how 20,000 U.S. troops returning from Iraq would be stationed inside America under Northcom for purposes of “domestic security” from September 2011 onwards.

Northcom officials were forced to subsequently issue a denial after the Army Times initially reported that the troops would be used to deal “with civil unrest and crowd control.”

An article published in the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs, the mouthpiece for the influential Council on Foreign Relations, Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, General Raymond T. Odierno, advocates the army be “transitioned” into a more “flexible force” by deploying in situations normally reserved for domestic law enforcement officials. He argues that by doing so, troops will be better equipped to deal with conflict elsewhere.

Domestic deployment of troops for purposes of law enforcement is a clear violation of section 1385 of the Posse Comitatus Act, which states, “Whoever, except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress, willfully uses any part of the Army or the Air Force as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.”

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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show and Infowars Nightly News.